I. A. Richards
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Ivor Armstrong Richards (26 February 1893 in Sandbach, Cheshire – 7 September 1979 in Cambridge) was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, were among the founding documents of the New Criticism, and most of the eminent New Critics were Richards's students. Since the New Criticism, at least in English-speaking countries, is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism, Richards is one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.
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[edit] Biographical sketch
[edit] Beginnings
Richards began his career without formal training in literature at all; Richards studied philosophy ("moral sciences") at Cambridge University. This may have led to one of Richards' assertions for the shape of literary study in the 20th century -- that literary study cannot and should not be undertaken as a specialization in itself, but instead studied alongside a cognate field (philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, etc.).
Richards' earliest teaching appointments were in the equivalent of what might be called "adjunct faculty" positions; Magdalene College at Cambridge would not salary Richards to teach the new and untested field of English literature. Instead, Richards collected tuition directly from the students as they entered the classroom each week.
[edit] Influence
Richards served as mentor and teacher to other prominent critics, most notably William Empson and F.R. Leavis.
[edit] Contributions
Richards' life and influence can be divided into periods, which correspond roughly to his intellectual interests. In many of these achievements, Richards found a collaborator in C. K. Ogden.
[edit] Collaboration with Ogden
An assessment of Richards' work and biography requires mention of C. K. Ogden, Richards' collaborator on three of the most important projects of Richards' life and work.
In Foundations of Aesthetics (co-authored by Richards, Ogden & James Woods), Richards maps out the principles of aesthetic reception which lay at the root of Richards' literary theory (the principle of "harmony" or balance of competing psychological impulses). Additionally, the structure of the work (surveying multiple, competing definitions of the term "aesthetic") prefigures his work on multiple definition in Coleridge on Imagination, in Basic Rules of Reason and in Mencius on the Mind.
In The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, Richards and Odgen work out the triadic theory of semiotics which, in its dependence on psychological theories, prefigures the importance of psychology in Richards independently authored literary criticism. Additionally, many current semioticians (including Eco) salute this work as a vast improvement on the dyadic semiotics of Saussure.
Finally, in works like The General Basic English Dictionary and Times of India Guide to Basic English, Richards and Ogden developed their most internationally influential project -- the Basic English program for the development of an international language based with an 850-word vocabulary. Richards' own travels, especially to China, made him an effective advocate for this international program. At Harvard, he took the next step, integrating new media (television, especially) into his international pedagogy.
[edit] Aesthetics and literary criticism
[edit] Works
- The Foundations of Aesthetics (George Allen and Unwin: London, 1922). Co-authored with C. K. Ogden and James Wood. 2nd edition with revised preface, (Lear Publishers: New York 1925).
- Principles of Literary Criticism (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner: London, 1924; New York, 1925). Subsequent editions: London 1926 (with two new appendices), New York 1926 (Same as London 1926, but with new preface, dated New York, April 1926), 1928 (with rev preface).
- Science and Poetry (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner: London, 1926). A reset edition was published in the same year in New York, by W. W. Norton, 1926. Second edition, revised and enlarged: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner: London, 1935. There is no known US publication of the 2nd Edition, however the text of the 1935 edition was reset, with a 'Preface', 'Commentary', and an additional essay, 'How Does a Poem Know When it is Finished' (1963), as Poetries and Sciences (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 1970).
- Practical Criticism (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner: London, 1929). Subsequent editions: 1930 (rev).
[edit] Influence
Richards is often mislabeled as the father of the New Criticism, largely because of the influence of Principles and of Practical Criticism. Practical Criticism is remembered because Richards removed authorial and contextual information from several literary works, then assigned those works to undergraduates, attempting to ascertain what blocks hindered literary interpretation. This approach is not justification for the kind of ahistorical, acontextual reading of poetry that New Criticism purportedly validated in secondary schools and universities.
In using this method, Richards was not justifying a new hermeneutic. Instead, he was doing something unprecedented in the field of literary studies: he was interrogating the interpretive process itself, by analyzing the self-reported interpretive work of students. (To that end, his work seems a historical opening to the work done in English Education and Composition [Flower & Hayes] as they engage empirical studies.)
Richards was deeply invested in understanding literary interpretation from an individual, psychological perspective. He read deeply in psychological theory of the day, finding the psychological work of Sherrington most useful for his own work. While his theories of poetic interpretation and poetic language have been surpassed, his initial impulses (to ground a theory of interpretation in both the theoretical language of psychology and aesthetic theory, as well as in empirical work) shaped 20th century literary studies into what it is today.
[edit] Rhetoric, semiotics and prose interpretation
[edit] Works
- The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. Co-authored with C. K. Ogden. With an introduction by J. P. Postgate, and supplementary essays by Bronislaw Malinowski, 'The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages', and F. G. Crookshank, 'The Importance of a Theory of Signs and a Critique of Language in the Study of Medicine'. London and New York, 1923.
- 1st: 1923 (Preface Date: Jan. 1923)
- 2nd: 1927 (Preface Date: June 1926)
- 3rd: 1930 (Preface Date: Jan. 1930)
- 4th: 1936 (Preface Date: May 1936)
- 5th: 1938 (Preface Date: June 1938)
- 8th: 1946 (Preface Date: May 1946)
- NY: 1989 (with a preface by Umberto Eco)
- Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.: London; Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1932).
- Coleridge on Imagination (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner: London, 1934; New York, 1935). Later editions: NY and London 1950 (Revised with new preface), Bloomington 1960 (Reprints 1950, with new foreword by Richards and introduction by K. Raine).
- The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford University Press: New York and London, 1936).
- Interpretation in Teaching (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London; Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1938). Subsequent editions: 1973 (with 'Retrospect').
- Basic in Teaching: East and West (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner: London, 1935).
- How To Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading, With an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words (W. W. Norton: New York, 1942; Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1943). Subsequent editions: 1959 (Beacon Press: Boston. With new 'Introduction').
- The Wrath of Achilles: The Iliad of Homer, Shortened and in a New Translation (W. W. Norton: New York, 1950; Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1951).
- Times of India Guide to Basic English (Bombay: The Times of India Press), 1938; Odgen, C.K. & Richards, I.A.
