艾弗·阿姆斯特朗·理查兹

艾弗·阿姆斯特朗·理查兹（英语：Ivor Armstrong Richards，也作瑞恰慈，1893年2月26日—1979年9月7日），英国文学批评家、诗人、英语教育家。他是新批评学派的创始人之一，也是基本英语运动的主要传播者。

生平

瑞恰慈出生于英国柴郡桑德巴奇。他于1911年起就读于剑桥大学，1915年获伦理学学士学位。1918年剑桥大学英语学院成立，他是学院的创始人之一。同时，他开始在剑桥开举办文学讲座，由此走上文学批评之路。1922年至1929年间，瑞恰慈为剑桥大学英语与伦理学讲师。1929年他前往中国，任教于清华大学与燕京大学。1931年起，任美国哈佛大学英语教授。1961年退休后，他开始创作诗歌与戏剧。1973年返回英国剑桥居住。1979年他因病提前结束了在中国的访问回到英国后于9月7日去世，终年86岁。

瑞恰慈将语义学、心理学、哲学等引入文学批评理论。其代表作包括《意义的意义》（The Meaning of Meaning，1923年与查尔斯·凯·奥格登合著）、《文学批评原理》（Principles of Literary Criticism，1924年）、《科学与诗》（Science and Poetry，1926年）、《实用批评》（Practical Criticism，1929年）、《修辞哲学》（The Philosophy of Rhetoric，1936年）等，对20世纪西方文学批评理论有着深远影响，被誉为“现代批评理论之父”。

Ivor Armstrong Richards CH (26 February 1893 – 7 September 1979), known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.

Richards' intellectual contributions to the establishment of the literary methodology of New Criticism are presented in the books The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).

Biography

Richards was born in Sandbach. He was educated at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his intellectual talents were developed by the scholar Charles Hicksonn 'Cabby' Spence. He began his career without formal training in literature; he studied philosophy (the "moral sciences") at Cambridge University, from which derived his assertions that, in the 20th century, literary study cannot and should not be undertaken as a specialisation, in and of itself, but studied alongside a cognate field, such as philosophy, psychology or rhetoric. His early teaching appointments were as adjunct faculty: at Cambridge, Magdalene College would not pay a salary for Richards to teach the new, and untested, academic field of English literature. Instead, like an old-style instructor, he collected weekly tuition directly from the students as they entered the classroom.

Richards was appointed a college lecturer in English and moral sciences at Magdalene in 1922. Four years later, when the Faculty of English at Cambridge was formally established, he was awarded a permanent post as a university lecturer. In the 1929–30 biennium, as a visiting professor, he taught Basic English and Poetry at Tsinghua University, Beijing. In the 1936–38 triennium, he was the director of the Orthological Institute of China. Eventually tiring of academic life at Cambridge, in 1939 he accepted an offer to teach in the school of education at Harvard University. Appointed a professor in 1944, he remained there until his retirement in 1963. In 1974, he returned to Cambridge, having retained his fellowship at Magdalene, and lived in Wentworth House in the grounds of the college until his death five years later.

In 1926, Richards married Dorothy Pilley, whom he had met on a mountain climbing holiday in Wales. She died in 1986. Pilley's book recounts many of the climbs they did together in the 1920s and 1930s, including their celebrated 1928 first ascent of the north, north west ridge of the Dent Blanche in the Swiss Alps.

Contributions

Collaborations with C. K. Ogden

The life and intellectual influence of I. A. Richards approximately corresponds to his intellectual interests; many endeavours were in collaboration with the linguist, philosopher, and writer Charles Kay Ogden (C. K. Ogden), notably in four books:

I. Foundations of Aesthetics (1922) presents the principles of aesthetic reception, the bases of the literary theory of “harmony”; aesthetic understanding derives from the balance of competing psychological impulses. The structure of the Foundations of Aesthetics—a survey of the competing definitions of the term æsthetic—prefigures the multiple-definitions work in the books Basic Rules of Reason (1933), Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932), and Coleridge on Imagination (1934)