The New Critics and feeling

While Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings is a truly, truly unbelievable and refreshing work, I'm disturbed a bit by the bashing that some the New Critics, and particularly Richards, take in the chapter on tone. Ngai wants to see tone as the following:

something much more holistic and explicitly affective than the narrow concept employed by Richards in Practical Criticism--namely, a speaker's attitude to his listener.
-Ugly Feelings, 41

She goes on to say that the New Critics following Richards on tone

notably muted, and in some cases took pains to avoid, the affective dimensions of the problem. This de-emotionalizing tendency is already apparent in the way Richards [in Practical Criticism] separates "Tone" from "Feeling."
-Ugly Feelings, 41

So the New Critics de-emotionalize tone. Okay, I'll bite. But it isn't clear that Ngai herself doesn't really get at tone either. She re-emotionalizes tone, perhaps, but in doing this is so much more concerned with things like mood and atmosphere that it isn't clear to me whether she is just making up something wholly new and just then calling it "tone." Making up something is okay, but I don't see why she would need to then act as if she is tying it back into a tradition of theorizing on tone, except to just bash away:

It should be clear that by "tone" I mean less the dramatic "attitude" adumbrated by the New Critics than a global and hyper-relational concept of feeling that encompasses attitude: a literary text's affective bearing, orientation, or "set toward" its audience and world. In other words I mean the formal aspect of a work that has made it possible for critics of all affiliations... to describe a work or class of works as "paranoid" [...] "euphoric" [...] or "melancholic."
-Ugly Feelings, 44-45

But I'll take what she's saying as if she is indeed picking a fight with Richards rather than just dealing with a straw man. In saying what she says about Richards, she acts as if an entire theory of communication (as it is represented in only one book--Practical Criticism--out of the many in which Richards elaborated and refined this theory) which is precisely constructed in order to account for affect in language would, by virtue of precisely this constructedness (the mere fact they tried to do it at all), exclude real affect. And while she has a very rich concept of what real affect is (though I'm not too sure what "global" and "hyper-relational" mean), it doesn't mean that Richards especially, and even some of the New Critics (as well as some of the philosophers she cites), haven't stumbled upon it before.
This however is the problem with studies giving pride of place to affect more generally: they merely invert the dominant paradigm, and in doing so, denigrate or keep virginal what they champion. Affect has to be overlooked in order to be celebrated. And while Ngai is better than everyone else who is concerned with the subject (by far), she here falls prey to this tendency. Obviously the New Critics didn't give pride of place to affect--I think that's true. But--like with Kant and Hegel and all the others she cites--that doesn't mean that they weren't some of the people that in fact were really trying to account for it and even combatting those (like scientists: see Richards' Science and Poetry and a lot of the work of Leavis) who denigrated it.
There is a weird progressivism at work here--which is otherwise generally merited because Ngai's work is really so new.
Even weirder is the picking of someone out of that tradition--Heidegger, whose theory of mood she champions--and using him as if he were more conscious than the rest of what real feeling is about. Frankly, it isn't really clear to me that Heidegger is the best choice, either. I think someone like Hume might actually be better. Heidegger's theory of mood is so emptied out of the ontic that mood merely stands in for facticity. And who is to say that facticity is the same thing as real feeling? Yet Ngai thinks with Heidegger that there's no incompatability between them--in fact, that facticity and feeling are more compatible than something like Richards' attitudes and feeling. Perhaps she's right on the first point (the compatibility): I doubt that she is on the second (the incompatibility of Richards' attitudes and feeling).
The bigger point, however, is this: why read Heidegger favorably and then turn on all the others? Why not read the others as favorably, and reconstitute a whole history of the theories of real feeling? It seems that Ngai has a pretty concrete sense of what real feeling is, and sees a lot of people excluding that over the years. Heidegger is more open to it. But who is to say that other thinkers of feeling and affect haven't just been mischaracterizing a little what Ngai is getting at--as Heidegger himself thought and in fact tried to demonstrate at length? Why assert that they have the entirely wrong phenomenon in view in the first place (and not just its ontic aspects)--as Ngai seems to do? It just seems like more bashing of the New Critics to me, combined with a sense that they in fact came a little too close to theorizing affect in literature in the way Ngai does. And it doesn't seem clear to me that a reconsideration of "tone"--as opposed to something else--is really what makes this possible.