Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics Book

I.A. Richards wrote this book at a time when English literature was a nascent field of study and the different branches of modern literary theory weren't quite codified yet. His most important contemporaries were F.R. Leavis, William Empson, and T.S. Eliot. It is striking to me how each had a unique character to their writing. Leavis was dry and academic, and preoccupied with morality. Empson was dry and academic, and preoccupied with close reading. Eliot was flowery and ostentatious, and preoccupied with broad concepts of tradition. Richards, in contrast, is the psychology guy. He has more in common with Empson than the others. His writing draws from several disciplines and both are cited as practitioners of New Criticism, an important step between liberal humanism and structuralism that privileges the significance of content over context.

At the time he wrote Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards was quite taken with new theories about the brain. He tries to build an account of literary theory based chiefly on how literature is received through psychological experiences. There is a lot of fertile discussion here. He talks at length about the systematization of impulses that happen in the mind when we receive a work of art, and how these interact with theories in linguistics, communication, and aesthetics. I do not claim to understand it all, but a crude sketch his views is that Richards wanted to make literary criticism more like a science, and that many things we once took for granted like beauty are subjective responses in the mind. He tries to explain several errors he perceives in the practice of critics who don't account for this, such as using language in such a way that it treats subjective experiences in the mind as if they were essentialist properties of the artwork in question.

My main issue is that much of Richards's terminology is arcane at times and likely outmoded. He is quite contradictory at times, deriding snobbery but happily partaking in it when it suits him. One particularly egregious part claims that our psychological impulses are a product of the consensus of the community we live in, and that racial boundaries (not cultural) are a barrier to successful communication about art. He cites F. G. Crookshank's discredited book The Mongol in Our Midst to support this, which suggests Down syndrome is an evolutionary throwback that originated in Mongols. Even looking at it as a product of his time, Richards's book isn't very good. It is worth reading if you are tracking the slippery history of literary theory before semiotics, but other than the introduction and a select few chapters, I can't say I recommend it.