The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Objective criticism

Objective criticism: A type of literary criticism in which works are viewed as freestanding objects, independent of any external references, whether to their authors, audiences, or the environments in which they are written or read — i.e., as authoritative and sufficient in and of themselves, or even as worlds-in-themselves. Accordingly, objective critics evaluate and analyze works based on internal criteria, such as whether they are coherent and unified and how their components relate to one another, rather than on external standards of judgment, such as how they have been received. Many of the tenets of objective criticism were articulated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790). In the twentieth century, objective criticism has evolved through the work of several groups of practical critics, especially those formalists associated with the New Criticism.