IA Richards and empirical studies of poetry

What is it about?

In Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment , I. A. Richards marks his standing as the herald of three trends of literary criticism: the empirical study of literature, New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism. What is more, in this book he affiliates himself with the experimental psychology of his time and by extension with the rising prominence of Gestalt theory within this discipline. Our research weaves together not only these three trends but also his Interaction Theory of Metaphor, detailed in The Philosophy of Rhetoric . This essay draws out the implications of Richards’s approach to cognitive literary studies for our own empirical work on poetic metaphor.

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Why is it important?

A productive strategy for cognitive psychology must address both problem solving and metaphor comprehension within the same study, thereby integrating these two areas of research. A judicious choice of a poetic text, coupled with an appropriate experimental paradigm, therefore, best serves interdisciplinary scholarship.