Identify the one who was not a ‘New Critic’:

Correct option is D

Explanation:

The correct answer is Claude Levi-Strauss.

New Criticism was a literary movement that emerged in the early 20th century, primarily in America, emphasizing close reading and the intrinsic value of a text, independent of historical or biographical context.

Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks were all prominent figures of the New Criticism movement.

However, Claude Levi-Strauss was a structuralist critic and anthropologist, not a New Critic.

Information Booster:

New Criticism and Its Key Figures:

- New Criticism developed in the 1930s and 1940s as a reaction against historical and biographical criticism.

- It focused on analyzing the formal elements of a literary work, such as structure, imagery, paradox, irony, and ambiguity, rather than the author’s intentions or historical context.

Major Works and Critics in New Criticism:

- Allen Tate – Tension in Poetry (1938)

- Robert Penn Warren – Co-authored Understanding Poetry (1938) with Cleanth Brooks

- Cleanth Brooks – The Well Wrought Urn (1947)

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a French anthropologist and structuralist critic.

- His structuralist theory focused on underlying structures in myths, culture, and language, rather than analyzing literary texts in isolation as New Critics did.

Key Works:

- Structural Anthropology (1958)

- The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

- Mythologiques (1969)