New Criticism is a method of literary analysis that focuses solely on analyzing the text itself without consideration of external contexts like the author's life or the reader's response. It treats the text as an independent, self-contained object that contains all the necessary information to interpret its meaning. The method employs a structured, formulaic analysis to determine the text's organic unity and heresy of paraphrase. It has limitations in that it believes in one correct reading and ignores ambiguity, as well as being rigidly structured and possibly elitist.