Sir Christopher Ricks | |
|---|---|
| Born | Christopher Bruce Ricks (1933-09-18)18 September 1933 (age 92) |
| Occupation | Critic, scholar, professor |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Genre | Literary criticism |
| Notable awards | 2003 Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award |
Sir Christopher Bruce RicksFBA FRSL (born 18 September 1933)[1] is a Britishliterary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities atBoston University (US), co-director of theEditorial Institute atBoston University, and wasProfessor of Poetry at theUniversity of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of theAssociation of Literary Scholars and Critics.
He is known as a champion ofVictorian poetry; an enthusiast ofBob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length;[2] a trenchant reviewer[3] of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan,Christopher Norris,Geoffrey Hartman,Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis,W. K. Wimsatt,Christina Stead).Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence",[4] andGeoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence".[5]W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding".[6]John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".[7]
He was born inBeckenham, England, the younger son of James Bruce Ricks, who worked for the family overcoat manufacturing firm, and Gabrielle (née Roszak), daughter of a furrier of French origin.[1][8][9] Ricks was educated atKing Alfred's School, Wantage[10] (a near-contemporary of the jockeyLester Piggott), then – as the first of his family to attend university[1] – studied atBalliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with afirst in hisB.A. in English in 1956, aB.Litt. in 1958, andM.A. in 1960.[10] He served in theGreen Howards in theBritish Army in 1953/4 inEgypt. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature atWorcester College, Oxford, moving in 1968, after asabbatical year atStanford University, to become Professor of English at theUniversity of Bristol.
During his time at Bristol he worked onKeats and Embarrassment (1974), in which he made revelatory connections between the letters and the poetry. It was also at Bristol that he first published his still-definitive edition ofTennyson's poetry. In 1975, Ricks moved to theUniversity of Cambridge, where in 1982 he becameKing Edward VII Professor of English Literature in succession toFrank Kermode, before leaving forBoston University in 1986. In June 2011, it was announced Ricks would join the professoriate ofNew College of the Humanities, a private college inLondon.[11]
He wasknighted in the2009 Birthday Honours.[12] He was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature in 1970.[13]
Ricks has distinguished himself as a vigorous upholder of traditional principles of reading based onpractical criticism. He has opposed the theory-drivenhermeneutics of thepost-structuralist andpostmodernist. This places him outside the post-New Criticalliterary theory, to which he prefers theJohnsonian principle.
In an important essay,[14] he contrasts principles derived empirically from a close parsing of texts, a tradition whose great exemplar was Samuel Johnson, to the fashionable mode for philosophical critique thatdeconstructs the "rhetorical" figures of a text and, in doing so, unwittingly disposes of the values and principles underlying the art of criticism itself. "Literature", he argues, "is, among other things, principled rhetoric".
