ABSTRACT
I.A.Richards decided that literary criticism was effectively a branch of behaviourist psychology, and as a consequence he was less interested in the aesthetics of criticism, which could never attain explicitness, than in a psychologically oriented close reading that perhaps could. For him analysing text was, therefore, in accordance with the philosophy of A.J.Ayer (Ayer, 1936), an exercise in evaluating the different kinds of formal complexity in the text that control the reader’s response.
