John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, and editor who helped found the New Criticism school of literary criticism. He was the first editor of the influential Kenyon Review. Ransom argued that literary criticism should focus solely on analyzing the text itself rather than external factors like the author's biography or historical context. Specifically, he believed criticism should exclude personal impressions, summaries, historical studies, linguistic analyses, and moral judgments. Instead, criticism should receive its own authority to conduct technical studies of elements within the text like poetry, rhetoric, and language. Ransom's views emphasized close reading and interpretation of the literal words on the page.
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, and editor who helped found the New Criticism school of literary criticism. He was the first editor of the influential Kenyon Review. Ransom argued that literary criticism should focus solely on analyzing the text itself rather than external factors like the author's biography or historical context. Specifically, he believed criticism should exclude personal impressions, summaries, historical studies, linguistic analyses, and moral judgments. Instead, criticism should receive its own authority to conduct technical studies of elements within the text like poetry, rhetoric, and language. Ransom's views emphasized close reading and interpretation of the literal words on the page.
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, and editor who helped found the New Criticism school of literary criticism. He was the first editor of the influential Kenyon Review. Ransom argued that literary criticism should focus solely on analyzing the text itself rather than external factors like the author's biography or historical context. Specifically, he believed criticism should exclude personal impressions, summaries, historical studies, linguistic analyses, and moral judgments. Instead, criticism should receive its own authority to conduct technical studies of elements within the text like poetry, rhetoric, and language. Ransom's views emphasized close reading and interpretation of the literal words on the page.
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, and editor who helped found the New Criticism school of literary criticism. He was the first editor of the influential Kenyon Review. Ransom argued that literary criticism should focus solely on analyzing the text itself rather than external factors like the author's biography or historical context. Specifically, he believed criticism should exclude personal impressions, summaries, historical studies, linguistic analyses, and moral judgments. Instead, criticism should receive its own authority to conduct technical studies of elements within the text like poetry, rhetoric, and language. Ransom's views emphasized close reading and interpretation of the literal words on the page.
educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. He was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.
Ransom’s position is that the critic must study literature,
not about literature. According to Ransom, criticism should exclude: 1) personal impressions, because the critical activity should “cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject”. 2) synopsis and paraphrase, since the plot or story is an abstraction from the real content of the text; 3) historical studies, which might include literary backgrounds, biography, literary sources, and analogues; 4) linguistic studies, which include identifying allusions and meanings of words; 5) moral content, since this is not the whole content of the text; 6) “Any other special studies which deal with some abstract or prose content taken out of the work”. Ransom demands that criticism, whose proper province includes technical studies of poetry, metrics, tropes, and should “receive its own charter of rights and function independently”. His arguments have often been abbreviated into a characterization of New Criticism as focusing on “the text itself ” or “the words on the page”.
SUBMITTED BY Samuel Benson.L [18-UEL-059] [Department of English]
(Cambridge Texts in The History of Political Thought) Thomas More, George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams (Translator) - More - Utopia-Cambridge University Press (2018 (2016) )