ABSTRACT
Most of the arguments that can be directed against New Criticism have already been mentioned in connection with the work of Roland Barthes. Barthes's total lack of reverence for the 'text' represents, of course, a frontal assault on New Criticism's first principle, which is that discussion should severely limit itself to an objective analysis of the 'words on the page'. New Criticism's admiration of complexity, balance, poise and tension could be said to sustain the characteristic bourgeois concern for a 'fixed' and established, unchanging reality, because it disparages forceful, consistent and direct action. The attitudes implicit in New Criticism itself may, in turn, be said to have been influential on the 'real foundations'. New' New Criticism would thus claim to respond to literature's essential nature in which signifiers are prised utterly free of signifieds, aiming, in its no-holds-barred encounter with the text, for a coherence and validity of response, not objectivity and truth.
