"Reading After the Great War: I. A. Richards and the Hope of Literature": A Lecture by Kent Cartwright

Writing in the 1920a, after the Great War, I. A. Richards of Cambridge University was the
first and most influential theorist of close reading. His single and co-authored books of that
period include The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922), The Meaning of Meaning (1923),
Principles of Literary Criticism 1924), Science and Poetry (1926), and, pre-eminently,
Practical Criticism (1929), which became the guiding light of the Cambridge English School
and set the model for modern literary studies. Richards’s close reading remains the
profession’s almost universal techné. But Richards had in mind more than just a
technology for understanding meaning. His larger goal was to outline a psychology of
reading that could address the cultural fragmentation and personal despair of the post–war
years. “Poetry,” he argued, “is capable of saving us.” He wrote and taught with the belief
that reading literature really mattered. In Richards’s work, we can find a concept of
aesthetic empowerment that just might be relevant for today.

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