Aleksandra Violana

I.A. Richards’ critical output, especially in Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, 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 late rise of cognitive approaches to literary theory and analysis. This paper 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.

What does it mean for a text to be transparent? If in order to be considered such, as the Oxford English Dictionary among others tells us, a thing must either be ‘easily seen’ or else ‘easily seen through’, what does this contradiction embedded into the term mean for the reader of transparent things? Vladimir Nabokov engages precisely this line of inquiry in the candidly named 1972 Transparent Things, his penultimate text before his death in 1977. In doing so, Nabokov also articulates a particular understanding of and attraction to transparency which has permeated his body of works since at least the 1920s and which, in this emphatic iteration, serves to complicate the notion of any stability in the roles of ‘authors’ and ‘readers’; to dismantle the dichotomous logic of the categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’; and finally to advocate for that which appears as ‘surface’ as the space where writing, reading and criticism is at its most fluid, inventive and kaleidoscopic.