I. A. Richards Among the Scientists

• Published in: ELH Vol. 86; no. 3; pp. 751 - 777
• Main Author: Green, Elspeth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2019
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Ambiguity; American literature; British & Irish literature; Collaboration; Criticism; Departments; Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965); English literature; Essays; Grammatical aspect; Ideology; Interdisciplinary aspects; Irish literature; Joyce, James (1882-1941); Keats, John (1795-1821); Library collections; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary translation; Metaphor; Philosophy; Poetry; Psychology; Publishing; Publishing industry; Readers; Rhetoric; Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872-1970); Science; Writers; New York; United States > US
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2019.0028
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547

This essay argues that I. A. Richards's early critical practices were the product of his involvement with the popular science publishing empire of his friend and sometime-collaborator, C. K. Ogden. Recent reevaluations of Richards's legacy have sought to rescue "close reading" from the New Critics. This effort is incomplete without an examination of Ogden's science series, in which Richards's major early books were published alongside works of psychology, anthropology, and physics. Richards's later definition of metaphor as a "transaction between contexts" emerges from the interdisciplinary rhetoric of Ogden's series, which attributed the scientific ignorance of the general public to increasing scientific specialization and sought to combat it by presenting diverse fields as interconnected "allies." I show that Richards's own rhetoric embodies the generic conventions of popular science. Further, I suggest that the metaphors of popular science can be viewed as iterative "readings" or interpretations of scientific practice, in the mode of Richards' own "practical criticism."