Ivor Armstrong Richards (26 February 1893 - 7 September 1979), known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, and rhetorician whose work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory, which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Richards' intellectual contributions to the establishment of the literary methodology of the New Criticism are presented in the books The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), Practical Criticism (1929), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).

The life and intellectual influence of I. A. Richards approximately corresponds to his intellectual interests; many endeavours were in collaboration with the linguist, philosopher, and writer Charles Kay Ogden (C.K. Ogden), notably in four books:  I. Foundations of Aesthetics (1922) presents the principles of aesthetic reception, the bases of the literary theory of "harmony"; aesthetic understanding derives from the balance of competing psychological impulses. The structure of the Foundations of Aesthetics--a survey of the competing definitions of the term aesthetic--prefigures the multiple-definitions work in the books Basic Rules of Reason (1933), Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932), and Coleridge on Imagination (1934)  II. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) presents the triadic theory of semiotics that depends upon psychological theory, and so anticipates the importance of psychology in the exercise of literary criticism. Semioticians, such as Umberto Eco, acknowledged that the methodology of the triadic theory of semiotics improved upon the methodology of the dyadic theory of semiotics presented by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).  III. Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930) and IV. the Times of India Guide to Basic English (1938) developed the Basic English program in effort to develop an international language, an interlanguage based upon a vocabulary of 850 English words.  Richards' travels, especially in China, effectively situated him as the advocate for an international program, such as Basic English. Moreover, at Harvard University, to his international pedagogy, the instructor I. A. Richards began to integrate the available new media for mass communications, especially television.

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