Of rhythm and texture: A cognitive aesthetics of embodiment in IA Richards’ Practical Criticism

Abstract

IA Richards’ critical output, especially in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), is often placed at the fore of an uncomplicated trajectory from New Criticism through a series of formalist approaches to literary texts, before finally being displaced by structuralism. Less routinely, Richards has been read as an early precursor to the rise of late cognitive approaches to literary theory and analysis. This article adopts the less routine approach and, where previous considerations have been more generalist, opts to assess the more particular cognitivist inclinations in Richards’ work. It does so by, firstly, bringing together the main precepts and principles of modern theories of ‘embodied cognition’, ‘image schemata’, ‘affordances’ and ‘texture’ with relevant analogues in Richards’ work, namely the ‘experience of forms’, ‘muscular images’, ‘poise’, and finally ‘texture’ as well as ‘rhythm’. Secondly, keeping in mind this ‘cognitive aesthetic’ toolkit, a term adopted in reflection of Richards’ broad theoretical reliance on the discipline of aesthetics in particular, it evaluates Richards’ consonance with, and potential contribution to, cognitivist scholarship.