Mencius on the Mind, Experiments in Multiple Definition

by Ivor A. Richards

1932 first edition of Richards' innovative work.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

British literary critic Ivor Armstrong Richards helped to develop Basic English, a constructed language that British linguist Charles Kay Ogden introduced in 1930 and that uses a simplified form of the basic grammar and core vocabulary of English; he also founded the movement of New Criticism, a method of literary evaluation and interpretation that, practiced chiefly in the mid-1900s, emphasizes close examination of a text with minimum regard for the biographical or historical circumstances of its production.

Clifton college educated this influential rhetorician; the scholar 'Cabby' Spence nurtured his love of English. His books, especially The Meaning of Meaning, Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, and The Philosophy of Rhetoric, proved founding influences. The concept of "practical criticism" led in time to the practices of close reading, what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism. Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English.

Reviews

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another uncategorisable book by I. A. Richards. It's difficult to see why he felt the need to include 40 pages of parallel text Mencius in the appendix in a translation that was deliberately literal and insufficiently annotated to the point of being a bit meaningless without Richards' specific commentary in a book whose body is only 120 pages long. Nonetheless, the concept of Multiple Definition is pretty cool and straightforward, and it plugs very nicely as a concrete teaching technique into Practical Criticism. Like PC and Coleridge on Imagination, this book continues to be probably naively optimistic about the global political consequences of reading more carefully, although the way Richards puts it in the following passage is at least interestingly ambiguous: "a generation which is cheerfully becoming more and more self-, sex-, race-, and world-conscious should not complain if it is required to become word-conscious also. And in such word-consciousness may be found the solvent for these other problems" (121). Pretty sure the generation he has in mind here is the Greatest Generation; many of his students were soldiers who survived WWI to be taught the first ever English lit classes during the interbellum period. Interesting to think about what they took from that as they lived through WWII.