Anglistiktag 2026 in München

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 endeavours 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 duress, we need to reflect on the historicity of such practices in an academic, institutional context. John North, discussing the intellectual discourse from the1920s 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 we would like to explore in our roundtable and workshop. I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929) is a perfect example of a classic of our field that is well-known, but little read. It is also an utterly unconventional academic text. While the premise of Richards’ pedagogical experiment – to ask students to comment on poems without any knowledge of author and context – remains a common feature of exam and classroom situations, Richards’ findings and conclusions in his book-length documentation of his process receive relatively little attention in our time. While he has retrospectively been marshalled as a precursor of New Criticism and a formalist focus on close reading, he is quite clear that his experiment provides insight not so much into the texts themselves, but into “the contemporary state of culture” (13). His object of inquiry, in other words, are 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, thus, is sociological and cultural rather than primarily formalist. Moreover, as a “field-work in comparative ideology,” (15) it is thoroughly political in so far as one of his major aims is the honing of his students’ critical ability and sense of discernment, a form of responsive and responsible reading.

With our workshop, we want to ask which aspects of ‘practical criticism’ might be useful in developing core new formalist practices that allow for a range of aesthetic responses and ideologies in keeping 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 assess it anew for its political and pedagogical potential today.