SOURCE: "Postmodernism and American Literary History," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCIX, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 40-60.

In the following essay, Hirsch defends New Criticism practices against what he perceives as the failed philosophical underpinnings of postmodern criticism.

Anglo-American New Criticism had nearly run its course by the end of the 1960s. What had started as an innovative method of reading literary works creatively had, in all too many instances, declined into a robotic and repetitious exercise in counting images and demonstrating paradoxes for their own sake. A clear signal that the end was at hand for the New Criticism was the proliferation of essays that seemed to have as their goal nothing more than adding up various kinds of imagery without regard to their importance or to how the images functioned in the semantic system of the work. In a liberal society founded on an ideology of revolution...