English Studies Day 2026 in Munich

Irmtraud Huber (Konstanz), Natalie Roxburgh (Hamburg), Wolfgang Funk (Mainz), 
Felix Sprang (Siegen)

Practical Criticism à la I.A. Richards – 
A Standard Procedure?

When we consider scholarly and pedagogical endeavors, as well as foundational sources and resources that inspire research and teaching in English Studies, the long tradition of so-called “practical criticism” is usually taken for granted. 

But at a time when reading skills and practices are under pressure, we need to reflect on the historicity of such practices in an academic, institutional context. John North, discussing the intellectual discourse from the 1920s to the 1970s, claims that “[t]he primary institutional site of ‘literary criticism,’ taken in this sense, was the academy, where it justified itself by reference to the distinctiveness of its research program and classroom methods, both of which were grounded in its founding innovations: ‘close reading’ and ‘practical criticism’ (2017, 5). It is the latter that we would like to explore in our roundtable and workshop. I. A. Richards’ *Practical Criticism* (1929) is a perfect example of a classic in our field that is well-known but rarely read. It is also a thoroughly unconventional academic text. While the premise of Richards’ pedagogical experiment—asking students to comment on poems without any knowledge of the author or context—remains a common feature of exam and classroom settings, Richards’ findings and conclusions in his book-length account of the process receive relatively little attention today. Although he has been retrospectively hailed as a precursor of New Criticism and a formalist emphasis on close reading, he makes it quite clear that his experiment provides insight not so much into the texts themselves, but into “the contemporary state of culture” (13). In other words, the object of his inquiry is his students’ values and judgments. Poetry, he suggests, serves “as an eminently suitable bait for anyone who wishes to trap the current opinions and responses in this middle field [of abstract opinion and disputation about matters of feeling] for the purpose of examining and comparing them, and with a view to advancing our knowledge of what may be called the natural history of human opinions and feelings” (15). Richards’ project, therefore, is sociological and cultural rather than primarily formalist. Moreover, as “fieldwork in comparative ideology” (15), it is thoroughly political insofar as one of his major aims is to hone his students’ critical ability and sense of discernment—a form of responsive and responsible reading.

Through our workshop, we seek to explore which aspects of “practical criticism” might be useful in developing core new formalist practices that allow for a range of aesthetic responses and ideologies consistent with democratic values and an understanding of the university as a pluralist institution. By revisiting Richards’ seminal work, we aim to interrogate it beyond its reduction to a formalist aesthetics and prescriptive views of taste, and to reassess it for its political and pedagogical potential today.