John Crowe ransom (1888— 1974), an American literary critic and poet, is one of the representatives of new criticism. New Criticism is a representative work of literary criticism by Lanson, which was first published in 194 1. The publication of this book established the name of "new criticism" and marked that "new criticism" officially became a critical principle. This book is divided into four chapters. In the first three chapters, Lanson inspected three main pioneers of new criticism: Richards, Eliot and Winters, and evaluated their achievements and shortcomings. In the last chapter, Lanson puts forward a new critic he expects to appear: ontological critic.
Lanson believes that there is a kind of criticism in our time, both in depth and accuracy, which exceeds all previous criticisms in Britain and America. It is a new criticism, and there are some unified criticism methods. However, criticism is a particularly difficult thing to explain clearly, and it is a new criticism. Novelty is always uncertain, inconsistent and even immature, and new criticism is no exception. Therefore, the author will discuss these new critics critically.
Lanson believes that the new criticism is hurt by two widespread theoretical errors. One is to criticize with psychological feeling words, trying to make literary judgments with terms about feelings, emotions and attitudes, rather than with terms about the objects of these emotions. Richards and Eliot made this mistake; The second is open moralism. The moralism in the new criticism shows that the new criticism has not been freed from the old criticism, and Winters made the mistake of moralizing. Lanson wants critics to get rid of these two burdens.
Ranson first discussed Richards, a "psychological critic". In his view, the discussion of new criticism must start from Richards, and the new criticism can almost be said to have started from him, or he embarked on the right path because he tried to build it on a broad basis. However, Richards talks about poetry as a psychologist. He believes that scientific knowledge is only influenced by other knowledge, not by emotions and desires. On the contrary, most of our knowledge in art can't stand the test of strict standards. The real value of art is not knowledge at all, but the emotional state it inspires and expresses. Richards' typical criticism method is psychological method, which extracts the emotion and desire of poetry experience from the cognitive aspect and gives them different and speculative behaviors. Ransom pointed out that the characteristics of any kind of emotion can't be simply defined by emotion, because we think that the remarkable characteristics belonging to a certain emotion actually belong to the object that makes us produce that kind of emotion. "Emotion is the counterpart of knowing the object." Lanson believes that poetry does involve emotion, but for critical theory, it is important to realize that emotion is spontaneously attached to the details of the situation. Since they are spontaneous, it is almost unnecessary for them to enter into criticism and discussion.
Lanson then discussed T.S., a "historical critic". Elliot. Eliot's criticism is usually to explore the standard practice of poetry creation, that is to say, this practice is in the mainstream or "tradition" of English poetry. Lanson believes that by comparing a practice with tradition, the critic proves the tradition or orthodoxy of this practice, but he does not prove the aesthetic value of this practice.
Yves Winters, a "logical critic", believes that moral interest is the only interest in poetry. However, Lanson pointed out that Winters' contribution to criticism is not his moralism, but his analysis of the logical structure of poetry, because the new criticism is not moral allergy, but is committed to becoming a literary criticism.
Finally, Lanson called for a critic who was lacking at that time: the critic of noumenon. He pointed out that poetry directly and convincingly showed the difference between it and prose, and the above-mentioned critics felt the difference, but they did not express exactly what the difference was. It is not moral preaching, nor is it emotion, feeling or "expression". Lanson believes that it is more convincing to regard a structure represented by poetry as this difference. This structure (a) is different from scientific prose, and it usually has no strict logic; (b) It contains and carries a lot of irrelevant or different materials, which obviously has nothing to do with the structure and even hinders the structure. From this perspective, Lanson gave a definition to poetry: "Poetry is a loose logical structure with some local muscles that are beside the point". He further pointed out that the structure itself can be any kind of logical exposition, dealing with all the contents suitable for logical exposition; Similarly, muscle mass seems to be any practical content that can be thought of. It must be free, unrestricted and extensive, otherwise it will not enter the structure correctly. Therefore, what distinguishes muscle from structure, poetry from prose is the order of content, not the type of content. As an expository text, the difference between poetry and logical expository text is an ontological difference, which involves an order of existence and an objective level, which scientific expository text cannot involve. Lanson explained that we live in a world, which must be distinguished from the abstract world or various worlds, because we are dealing with many worlds in science, which are decomposed, abridged and tamed variants of the world we live in. Poetic pictures, through their own perception and memory, restore the original world we vaguely know, which is more complicated and difficult to grasp. According to this hypothesis, "Poetry is a kind of knowledge which is very different from scientific knowledge in ontology", and the critics he expects are the ones who explore this kind of poetry understanding.