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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.

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535 views2 pages

John Crowe Ransom PDF

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.

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JOHN CROWE RANSOM

John Crowe Ransom (1888 –1974) was an American


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]

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