Practical criticism: An early experiment in reader response

Abstract

My article provides historical background to stylisticians’ current interest in empirical approaches to literary response by investigating the practical criticism experiment that IA Richards carried out in the 1920s and that he reported on in Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929). In literary studies, practical criticism is typically regarded as a method of reading that focuses on the text itself and that isolates the text from its social and historical context. Yet, Richards’ technique of issuing his student audiences with anonymized and unknown poems, and asking them for their written responses (or ‘protocols’), was explicitly part of a psychological experiment and not a model of how we should, or even could, read literature. And he was primarily – if not exclusively – interested in the responses of his readers to the poem and not in the poem itself. I have argued that Richards’ technique of practical criticism was the very first large-scale experiment in psychology conducted to discover how real readers understand, interpret and evaluate literary texts. As such, the experiment anticipated the relatively recent turn among stylisticians towards empirical research, and might still be able to inform that research. In this article, I compare Richards’ experiment with the psychological and aesthetic experiments that had been conducted beforehand. I then describe in detail what Richards actually did in his experiment, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of his methodology. Finally, I assess some of the ways in which Richards’ experiment might inform empirical research in stylistics today.