Abstract

The Next New Criticism

It is curious that, even long after psychoanalysis itself had become a parlor pastime at Greenwich Village, New York, New York (State) parties, conventional literary critics paid, on the whole, little attention to the fairly revolutionary psychoanalytic literary hypotheses. Even today, the connections between literary criticism and psychoanalysis are hesitant, few and tentative. One reason is that literary critics for the past forty years or so have been busy about a revolution of their own; another is that the psychoanalytic approach, despite a development that often seems to parallel that of the New Criticism, in some ways runs exactly counter to the most cherished assumptions of that first critical revolution of the century. The combination of New and psychoanalytic criticism hardly poses a threat to literature, according to the author.