Ivor Richards
| I. A. Richards | |
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I.A. Richards in the Alps c.1930
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| Born | Ivor Armstrong Richards 26 February 1893 Sandbach, Cheshire |
| Died | 7 September 1979 (aged 86) Cambridge |
| Occupation | Educator |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | Magdalene College, Cambridge |
| Spouse | Dorothy Pilley Richards |
Ivor Armstrong Richards (26 February 1893 – 7 September 1979), known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, and rhetorician whose work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory, which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential æsthetic object.
Richards' intellectual contributions to the establishment of the literary methodology of the New Criticism are presented in the books The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).
Richards was educated at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his intellectual talents were developed by the scholar Charles Hickson 'Cabby' Spence. He began his career without formal training in literature; he studied philosophy (the "moral sciences") at Cambridge University, from which derived his assertions that, in the 20th century, literary study cannot and should not be undertaken as a specialisation, in itself, but studied alongside a cognate field, such as philosophy, psychology and rhetoric.
His early teaching appointments were as adjunct faculty; at Cambridge University, Magdalene College would not pay a salary for the instructor I.A. Richards to teach the new and untested academic field of English literature. Instead, like an old-style instructor, I.A. Richards collected weekly tuition directly from the students, as they entered the classroom. In his private life, Ivor Armstrong Richards married Dorothy Pilley Richards in 1926; they had met on a mountain climbing holiday in Wales.
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