[Below, Beck and Rhoades compare Brooks's New Criticism and Stanley Fish's Reader-Response theory.]

The method of literary analysis which became known as the New Criticism began in meetings of the Nashville Fugitives during the 1920s, when John Crowe Ransom dominated the group. Between 1921 and 1925–1926, Ransom's students included Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who were to codify the "method" for use, first in their classes at LSU, and then in their critical essays and textbooks. Brooks, never a Fugitive and connected only briefly with Agrarianism, began to work out his own approaches to reading. He credits not only Ransom but also I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot with having influenced him in the formulation of his critical theories (Interview). Like Ransom and Richards, Brooks used the classroom as a laboratory before codifying his methods in two collections of essays, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Along with Warren, Brooks also combined theory with classroom experience in the structuring of textbooks which were to dominate literary pedagogy in the United States for the greater part of the twentieth century.

In 1947, Brooks moved to Yale University, where one of his graduate assistants was Stanley Fish, father-to-be of reader-response criticism. Although in recent letters to these authors, neither man professes to "remember" much about the other, that relationship of teacher and student, possibly problematic to both, may have played an indirect role in the evolution of Fish's approach, especially as a reaction to what Fish saw as the New Critical doctrine of the closed and autonomous literary text. Correspondingly, Brooks's dismissal of reader-response theory as an "anything goes" approach has served to over-dramatize the tension between the New Criticism and reader-response theories. In fact, the evolution of literature in general and criticism in particular may be viewed, after Harold Bloom, as a history of misreading, which has emerged in the two Bloomian modes of clinamen and kenosis; that is to say, the younger critic (Fish) both misreads and breaks away from his precursor. And although Bloom's terminology refers specifically to poets (14-15), he finds it possible, with but a slight adjustment, to make room for anxieties of influence between critics:

Poets' misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics' misinterpretations of criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry…. For just as a poet must be found by the opening in a precursor poet, so must the critic. The difference is that a critic has more parents … poets and critics. (94-95)

Without presenting a detailed Bloomian analysis of the Brooks-Fish relationship (and who but Bloom himself could do that?), there are strong suggestions to be found in a parallel examination of the critical praxes of Cleanth Brooks and Stanley Fish that they are a case in point.

I. Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism

Between 1922 and 1925, the group which called itself "The Fugitives" met in homes near the Vanderbilt campus, first for social and cultural interaction but later, under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom, as one of the first "workshops" in creative writing. These sessions became a laboratory in the close reading of the members' original poems, as well as a focus for the methods which Ransom used for a time in his Vanderbilt classes. When, in 1929, Ransom and his circle became Agrarians, turning their attention to other matters, he ceased even to demonstrate it in his classes. But before that change could occur, Ransom's students had included Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Brooks, like Ransom, the son of a Methodist preacher, came to Vanderbilt in 1925 when the Fugitive movement was at its apex. In his freshman year, Brooks was too impressed to take advantage of Ransom's classes. He attributed this failure to "awe" brought on by "ignorance and innocence and my confused romanticism" (Young 3). He dropped Ransom's class as being too advanced for him, although, as T. D. Young remarks, "ironically, Ransom was merely submitting the literary texts to the kind of close, analytical, interpretive readings that Brooks would become justly acclaimed for later" (3). As Ransom later shrewdly commented, Brooks and he were "about as like as two peas from the same pod in respect to our native regions, our stock (we were sons of ministers of the same faith, and equally had theology in our blood), the kind of homes we lived in, the kind of small towns; and perhaps we were most like in the unusual parallel of our formal educations." In particular, both he and Ransom had heard a lot of Methodist Sunday sermons, during which "the preacher unpacked the whole burden of his theology from a single figurative phrase of Scripture taken out of context" (334). Ransom was, therefore, tailor-made to be Brooks's strong precursor in the evolution of Brooks's textual criticism. He decided to major in English, rather than become "a really shifty halfback," after hearing Donald Davidson's essay on a Kipling story read by his graduate assistant English teacher. Brooks recalled:

This opened a new world for me. It revealed that you could look inside a story and see how it was put together, and could make sensible observations about it…. It showed me that the inner workings of a poem or a story were important. I'm sure that my prep school discipline in reading Latin and Greek—discussing the meaning of passages and parsing them—had prepared me rather directly for this new discipline of literary exploration. (Young 2)

During his senior year, Brooks read and became impressed with Ransom's poetry as well as with the "approach" to literature used in class by Ransom and Davidson. He seized on the concepts that "the sense of technique, the structure of a thing … [is] related to the life of the poem and then the life behind the poem" (Young 4).

After graduating from Vanderbilt in 1928, Brooks became connected briefly with Agrarianism by publishing one essay in Who Owns America? (1936), but criticism, not socio-politics, was to be his lifework. He began to work out his own approaches to reading apart from Ransom. The results were parallel and complementary production of his critical essays, soon collected in books, and a succession of textbooks beginning with a "Poetry Manual" (1935) (Brooks papers, Yale) for LSU students and An Approach to Literature, the four-genre predecessor to the vastly influential volumes Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, and Understanding Drama (the latter with Heilman instead of Warren). These textbooks, themselves extensions of the analytical dialogue that Warren first encountered in the Fugitive group meetings, began as mimeographed exercises handed out to LSU students (interview).

Brooks remained at LSU for five years after Warren departed—and their involvement with The Southern Review ended—in 1942. Diverse teaching assignments intervened, such as Ransom's Kenyon summer schools of criticism (1948 to 1950), and the University of Michigan summer class (English 300k) in 1942, with whom Brooks, according to an acknowledgment to The Well Wrought Urn, worked out some of the analyses that were included in that collection of essays. Yale was to be Brooks's ultimate academic connection, where he taught for many years and, in his words, "overlapped" twice more with his old colleague Robert Penn Warren (interview). Brooks, Warren, and others (including the young Americanist R.W.B. Lewis) were to continue their careers of textbook and anthology production as they taught and also pursued active careers as practicing critics through another four decades.