{"id":172,"date":"2019-05-27T10:05:13","date_gmt":"2019-05-27T10:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp10.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=172"},"modified":"2019-05-27T10:30:46","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T10:30:46","slug":"i-a-richards-and-practical-criticism","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp10\/chapter\/i-a-richards-and-practical-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"I A Richards and Practical Criticism"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\nIntroduction \u2013 What is Practical Criticism?<\/strong>\r\n
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I have set three aims before me, in constructing this book. First, to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture ... Secondly, to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry (and cognate matters) and why they should like or dislike it. Thirdly, to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

- I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism<\/em><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The technique of Practical Criticism and the name originates in I.A. Richards\u2019 book Practical Criticism <\/em>(1929), in which he described an experiment wherein undergraduate students of English were given unfamiliar poems, and were asked to read and to submit written comments upon them. With these student documentations or \u2018protocols\u2019, Richards theorized a model of literary criticism that would do two things. First, it would treat literary texts as behaviours, as external phenomena without reference to internal mental states. Second, it would record how the stimuli of poems affected readers physiologically and use these results to ground analyses of meaning and form. Practical Criticism, as conceived by Richards, pays attention to very small units of language in short lyric poems in a way that leads directly to the New Critics\u2019 emphasis on \u2018the poem in itself\u2019, and their associated rejection of the analysis of any kind of historical or political context.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The objective of Richards\u2019 experiment was to encourage students to concentrate on \u2018the words on the page\u2019, rather than relying on preconceived ideas about a text. Richards classified the student-responses into the following categories: inability to understand the author\u2019s meaning - sense, feeling, tone and intention; problems with the capacity to visualize and therefore understand imagery; dependence on stock or sentimental response; confusion\u00a0when a reader\u2019s beliefs conflict with those in a poem; being misled by personal associations: confusion resulting from a reliance on critical preconception and technical prejudgments. For Richards, the chief cause of these \u201cill-appropriate, stereotyped reactions is withdrawal from experience\u201d. The students did not read the poem, but understood the poem based on what others had told them. Following this, Practical Criticism may be defined as a close textual, verbal analysis of a work of art. The study is pragmatic and empirical, and makes literary criticism factual and scientific analysis.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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As against to a teacher reading a poem and lecturing on the verses, Richards devised an alternative method that encouraged independent reading and thinking of students. He was preoccupied with the following questions - how does a piece of writing communicate to the reader? How is the reader able to explain what is communicated? Can this type of communication be done in a precise way? Do poems look different if they are presented in isolation from the circumstances in which they were written or circulated? Do critical responses change if the reader is aware of some contextual information? How do we read a literary work without knowing its context \u2014 a period, a chronology, a social, political, religious, and intellectual background, a body of similar and contrasting works, works by the same and by related authors, linguistic and stylistic conventions, the relevant conceptions of art and literature and their role in the world.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Richards is critical of the framework of literature-classrooms and argues that \u201cThe idle hours of most lives are filled with reveries that are simply bad private poetry\u201d (320). For Richards, practical criticism \u2014 the close and attentive reading of the words of the poem \u2014 is \u201can opening up of the poem for what it can really be for us: a unique and fascinating experience, carefully wrought by its maker, and fully available only to those with the patience, as well as the sensibility, to recreate\u201d. However, the results of Richards\u2019 experiment \u201cwas horrifying. Magazine poetasters were extravagantly praised, Donne, Hopkins, and Christina\u00a0Rossetti firmly damned; every felicity was ridiculed, and every absurdity praised, by large minorities and even majorities.\u201d Without the intellectual history, the opinion and background of a literary work, the ideal meeting of an isolated mind with an isolated text, then, does not happen. Richards\u2019 project, practical criticism, is a means to train the literary community and create conditions favourable to commune effectively with the poem.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Theoretical framework of Practical Criticism<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\nRichards lists three aims for Practical Criticism:\r\n