The Study Of J.C. Ransom's "Texture"

As the considered embodiment of poetry's ontology,texture became the focus of attention in Ransom's poetry research.It can be said understand the theory of “texture” and we will understand the ransom's ontological criticism.This study is a relatively detailed monographic study on the theory of the “texture” based on the existing research results.The theory of “texture” is on the basis of the profound philosophical influence accepted by Ransom and the excellent results of the continuous thinking and practice that the New Criticism front-runners had done.The philosophical theories of Plato,Aristotle and Kant laid a profound philosophical foundation for the construction of aesthetic theory and epistemology of Ransom.In addition,Morris' s Semantics and Richards' s great achievements in the field of semantic aesthetics provide a strong linguistic support for Ransom to research the characteristics of language in poetry.It is on the basis of summing up the rich practical achievements and excellent theoretical genes of the pioneers of the new criticism,the theory of “texture” is more perfect.The “texture” character of poetry assumes the literary noumenon function of “the reason why poetry is poetry”.It is a powerful weapon to restore the perceptual intuition of the world and an important way to evaluate poetry and understand the world.But his ambiguity and the misleading nature of the relationship between “structure” and “texture”,often made he be criticized as a dualist.In fact,the relationship between “structure” and “texture” in poetry is one of opposition,dependence and dialectical unity.“Texture” of poetry is generated from the two-way interaction between the meters and the meaning in poetry.It has rich connotations,including various factors in poetry,such as diction and sentences,the punctuation and the meters,and so on,it is the collection of language features of poetry.In the completed poems,they are usually presented in two forms of details and images.The words and sentences,rhetorical devices,metrical patterns and images are all external manifestations of texture.In order to further consolidate the position of literature,Ransom distinguished the difference between scientific discourse and artistic discourse,further enriched and developed the theory of “texture” of poetry,preliminarily divided the ruling fields of science and art,and affirmed the role of poetry in the process of understanding the world.With the deepening of the research,the controversy also extended to whether Ransom held the same attitude in dealing with the relationship between the text and the world.However,Ransom failed to deal with the relationship between the “structure” and “texture” obviously,he ignoring the huge gap between the text and the world,so that it had fell into a difficult eclecticism situation.Only by clarifying the relationship between structure and texture can we grasp the importance of poetic texture in the literary criticism theory of Ransom.In order to better and deeper interpretation of Ransom's literary ontology criticism,we can cut into the poetic theory of Ransom from the main manifestations of texture.Despite the long-standing decline of ontology criticism,but in terms of its impact,it can also be used for reference to develop the literary criticism in the contemporary China.