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I. A. Richards

British literary critic and father of New Criticism who contributed 'Structure and communication' to the Kepes anthology Structure in Art and in Science alongside Buckminster Fuller.

Updated 2026-07-30 low confidence cold

I. A. Richards

British literary critic, rhetorician, and educator (1893–1979); pioneer of New Criticism.

Ivor Armstrong Richards was one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, widely regarded as the father of New Criticism and a transformative figure in the study of rhetoric, semantics, and the teaching of reading. Educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he lectured in English and Moral Sciences there before joining Harvard University in 1939, where he remained for the rest of his career. His early books — The Meaning of Meaning (1923, with C. K. Ogden), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929) — revolutionized the study of literature by insisting on close, systematic analysis of how language actually works on readers.

Richards was equally concerned with communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries. He collaborated with Ogden on Basic English, a simplified form of English designed to facilitate international understanding, and spent years developing methods for teaching English as a second language in China. His later work explored the parallels between poetic and scientific modes of understanding, and he maintained a lifelong interest in how the structure of language shapes thought. His presence in the Kepes anthology reflects the breadth of his engagement with the concept of structure beyond the literary domain.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: co-contributor. Richards contributed "Structure and communication" to Structure in Art and in Science (1965), the Gyorgy Kepes-edited anthology in which R. Buckminster Fuller contributed "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures." Richards's essay examined the structural principles underlying communication, bringing the perspective of linguistic and literary theory into dialogue with the anthology's broader inquiry into how structure operates across the arts and sciences.

See Also

Sources

  • Structure in Art and in Science (source reference) — Zotero record for the anthology