I. A. 리처즈와 의사소통의 문제

Abstract

I.A. Richards’ deep interest in the communicative function of language and poetry is manifest from his early scholarly career to the last. For Richards, poetry itself is a mode of communication. Since he argues that there is no difference in kind between aesthetic experience and everyday common experience, what matters in poetry is the communication of complex impulses from poet to reader placed in common linguistic situations and efficacy. Interpretation and understanding of the attributes of a language are prerequisite and inevitable for a fulfilled communication and communion of men. His “close reading” is a speculative instrument to read with and to think with. Richards applies his view of a poetic language to his philosophy of the “new” rhetoric. His new or improved rhetoric aims to remedy misunderstandings in communication, mainly due to misinterpretation of ambiguous meanings and verbal contexts and purposes. Metaphoricity is the very source of a language. Rhetoric in Richards shifts its focus from speaker to audience, and an effective communication requires from both the speaker and the listener Confucian sincerity in authentic feelings and intents. By enlarging and idealizing his rhetorical functions to the extent of self-development and self-completion by means of verbal communication, Richards unfortunately disregards the ideological dynamics of language and social beliefs, already and always superimposed on the speaking subject. His contextual theory of meaning is still stinted by his empirical positivism and psychologism. However, Richards unites poetics and rhetoric in his theory of communication and comprehension.