The form of the work is said to be a “structure of meanings”, in which an organic unity is achieved by the play and counterplay of “thematic imagery” and “symbolic action”. Instead, close reading focuses on the formal aspects or the verbal/linguistic elements of a text such as figures of speech, images, symbols, interaction between words, rhythm and metaphor. Endorsing the concept of “autotelic text”, that a text is a unified entity, complete in itself, and containing meaning without any reference to external evidence such as the author’s intention/history, biography or the socio-cultural condititns of its production, the New Critics, Wimsatt and Beardsley cautioned against the fallacies of judging a literary work based on the author’s intention or its impression on the reader, what they called “intentional Fallacy” and “Affective Fallacy”. A technique advocated by the New Critics in interpreting a literary work, Close Reading derived from (I A Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson’s The Seven Types of Ambiguity(1930).
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