Final answer:
New Criticism is the approach that focuses on analyzing language within the text itself to interpret meaning, emphasizing close reading and the inseparable link between a text's structure and theme.
Step-by-step explanation:
The approach that insists students extract meaning from a text by examining how language is used within the passage itself is known as New Criticism. This school of literary criticism emphasizes the importance of a text's form and linguistic features over external factors such as the author's life or historical context. It advocates for close, careful analysis of the text itself to ascertain its meaning.
New Criticism is a method that focuses on evaluating and interpreting a literary text based on its own elements without considering influences external to the work. New Critics utilize tools such as examining imagery, metaphor, and symbolism to deduce the text's theme and overall significance. They perform a close reading of the text, which is a scrutinizing examination to illustrate how structure and theme are intricately linked.
Literary analysis using New Criticism requires readers to be open to multiple interpretations and to integrate the reading and writing process, which often involves rereading works multiple times before forming an interpretation. Fundamentally, New Criticism is at the heart of every form of literary analysis and is essential for a deep understanding of literary works.