Affective fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1949 as a principle of New Criticism which is often paired with their study of The Intentional Fallacy.

1. The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Free Download

Concept[edit]

Wimsatt and Beardsley on Affective Fallacy. Brooks points to 's poem 'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free'. He begins by outlining the initial and surface conflict, which is that the speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion does not seem to be.

The concept of affective fallacy is an answer to the idea of impressionistic criticism, which argues that the reader's response to a poem is the ultimate indication of its value. It is the antithesis of affective criticism, which is the practice of evaluating the effect that a literary work has on its reader or audience. The concept was presented after the authors had presented their paper on The Intentional Fallacy.

First defined in an article published in The Sewanee Review in 1949, the concept of an affective fallacy was most clearly articulated in The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt's collection of essays published in 1954. Wimsatt used the term to refer to all forms of criticism that understood a text's effect upon the reader to be the primary route to analyzing the importance and success of that text. This definition of the fallacy, if strictly followed, touches on or wholly includes nearly all of the major modes of literary criticism, from Ovid's docere delictendo (to teach by delighting), Aristotle's catharsis, and Longinus's concept of 'transport' to late-nineteenth century belles-lettres and the contemporary Chicago Critics. For Wimsatt, the fallacy led to a number of potential errors, most of them related to emotional relativism. A view of literature based on its putative emotional effects will always be vulnerable to mystification and subjectivity; Wimsatt singles out the belletristic tradition exemplified by critics such as Arthur Quiller-Couch and George Saintsbury as an instance of a type of criticism that relies on subjective impressions and is thus unrepeatable and unreliable.

For Wimsatt, as for all the New Critics, such impressionistic approaches pose both practical and theoretical problems. In practical terms, it makes reliable comparisons of different critics difficult, if not irrelevant. In this light, the affective fallacy ran afoul of the New Critics' desire to place literary criticism on a more objective and principled basis. On the theoretical plane, the critical approach denoted as affective fallacy was fundamentally unsound because it denied the iconicity of the literary text. New Critical theorists stressed the unique nature of poetic language, and they asserted that—in view of this uniqueness—the role of the critic is to study and elucidate the thematic and stylistic 'language' of each text on its own terms, without primary reference to an outside context, whether of history, biography, or reader-response.

In practice, Wimsatt and the other New Critics were less stringent in their application of the theory than in their theoretical pronouncements. Wimsatt admitted the appropriateness of commenting on emotional effects as an entry into a text, as long as those effects were not made the focus of analysis.

Reception[edit]

As with many concepts of New Criticism, the concept of the affective fallacy was both controversial and, though widely influential, never accepted wholly by any great number of critics.

The first critiques of the concept came, naturally enough, from those academic schools against whom the New Critics were ranged in the 1940s and 1950s, principally the historical scholars and the remaining belletristic critics. Early commentary deplored the use of the word 'fallacy' itself, which seemed to many critics unduly combative. More sympathetic critics, while still objecting to Wimsatt's tone, accepted as valuable and necessary his attempt to place criticism on a more objective basis.

However, the extremism of Wimsatt's approach was ultimately judged untenable by a number of critics. Just as New Historicism repudiated the New Critics' rejection of historical context, so reader-response criticism arose partly from dissatisfaction with the concept of the text as icon. Reader-response critics denied that a text could have a quantifiable significance outside its being read and experienced by particular readers at particular moments. These critics rejected the idea of text as icon, focusing instead on the ramifications of the interaction between text and reader.

The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Free Download

While the term remains current as a warning against unsophisticated use of emotional response in analyzing texts, the theory underlying the term has been thoroughly eclipsed by more recent developments in criticism.^{[citation needed]}

Wimsatt and Beardsley[edit]

'The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism [ ... which ...] begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism [with the result that] the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.'

'The report of some readers ... that a poem or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account.'

Wimsatt and Beardsley on an ideal, objective criticism: 'It will not talk of tears, prickles or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion.'

'The critic is not a contributor to statistical countable reports about the poem, but a teacher or explicator of meanings. His readers, if they are alert, will not be content to take what he says as testimony, but will scrutinize it as teaching.'

Sources[edit]

• Barry, Peter (2009). Beginning theory; an introduction to literary and cultural theory, 3rd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Keast, William (1954). 'Review of The Verbal Icon.' Modern Language Notes 8 (1956): 591–7.
• Mao, Douglas (1996). 'The New Critics and the Text Object.' ELH 63 (1996): 227–254.
• Wimsatt, W.K & Monroe Beardsley, 'The affective fallacy', Sewanee Review, vol. 57, no. 1, (1949): 31–55.
• Wimsatt, W.K. with Monroe Beardsley (1954). The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Wimsatt and Beardsley were New Critics: The Extreme Version. In two famous co -authored essays—”The Affective Fallacy” () and “The Intentional Fallacy”. In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author’s intent as it is encoded in Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy” that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor. The Intentional Fallacy, according to Wimsatt, derives from Wimsatt and Beardsley consider this strategy a fallacy partly.

But this is not so. If there was nothing “haphazard or fortuitous” in the way the images returned to the surface, that may mean 1 that Coleridge could not produce what he did not have, that he was limited in his creation by what he had read or otherwise experienced, or 2 that having received certain clusters of associations, he was bound to return them in just the way he did, and that the value of the poem may be described in terms of the experiences on which he had to draw.

In such a case, to utter “I do” is not merely to report an internal disposition, but to perform an action, namely, to get married.

Such wlmsatt may take the form of certain images or motifs, for example. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem ” Prufrock “; it would not be a critical inquiry.

William K. Wimsatt

For Marxists especially those of the Soviet realism typeauthorial intent is manifest in the text and must be placed in a context of liberation and the materialist dialectic. Professor Ducasse does not say. For Marxist literary theorists, the author’s intent is always a dallacy for a particular set of ideologies in the author’s own day.

Will you believe wumsatt II It is not so much a historical statement as a definition to say that the intentional fallacy is a romantic one.

In certain flourishes such as the sentence we have quoted and in chapter headings like “The Shaping Spirit,” “The Magical Synthesis,” “Imagination.

In psychoanalytic criticismthe author’s biography and unconscious beardeley were seen as part of the text, and therefore the author’s intent could be revived from a literary text—although the intent might be an unconscious one. Perhaps faloacy knowledge of Donne’s interest in the new science may add another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question, though to say even this runs against the words.

Nevertheless, we submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: The strongest voices countering an emphasis on authorial intent in scholarly editing have been D.

Is Prufrock thinking about Donne?

Such an formalist approach makes literary meaning accessible to any reader. A poem does not come into existence by accident. Literary criticism Literary theory Narratology Intention Philosophy of literature.

THE INTENTIONAL FALLACy

But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker no matter how abstractly conceived to a situation no matter how universalized. And the paradox is only verbal and superficial that what is 1 internal is also public: Because intermediate evidence is so similar to external evidence; the two will sometimes overlap, making it difficult to distinguish between them.

The young imagination fired by Wordsworth and Carlyle is probably closer to the verge of producing a poem than the mind. This may be the case especially when authorial notes intenrional a text as they do with T. One demands that it work. In one quatrain of the poem, Donne uses astronomical language that may reflect changing Renaissance attitudes toward science. Geardsley biographical information doesn’t necessarily entail intentionalism; instead it may clarify the meanings of the words, the nuances of imagery, anv the literary text.

I know two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. It is difficult to answer argument like this, and impossible to answer it with evidence of like nature.

Authorial intent

The present writers, in a short article entitled “Intention” for a Dictionary 1 of literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any length. Dictionary of World Literature, Joseph T.

But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The art of inspiring poets, or at least of inciting something like poetry in young persons, has probably gone further in our day than ever before.

These are known as intentionalists and are identified with the Bowers-Tanselle school of thought. Certainly the poets have had something to say that the critic and professor could not say; their message has been more exciting: There is no reason why Donne might not have written a stanza in which the two kinds of celestial motion stood for two sorts of emotion at parting. Ad one gathers from notes that an author is alluding to a specific event, then the reader may turn to trying to interpret the work in the context of the author’s intentions.

If the distinction between kinds of evidence has implications for the historical critic, it has them no less for the contemporary poet and his critic. Bartram’s Travels contains a good deal of the history of certain words and of certain romantic Floridian conceptions that appear in ” Kubla Khan.

We mean to suggest by the above analysis that whereas notes tend to seem to justify themselves as external indexes to the author’s intention, yet they ought to be judged like any other parts of a composition verbal arrangement special to a particular contextand when so judged their reality as parts of the poem, or their imaginative integration with the rest of the poem, may come into question. If the poet succeeded in doing beatdsley, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.

A Critical Summary of intentional fallacy_百度文库

The question of “allusiveness,” wmisatt example, as acutely posed by the poetry of Eliot, is certainly one where a false judgment is likely to involve the intentional fallacy.

Paul de Man offers a significant critique of Wimsatt’s text, taken as an example of the understanding of the notion of ‘autonomy’ in New Criticism, in Blindness and Insight. The stand taken by F. Although this material may have appeared before beardsleh Khan,” say Wimsatt and Beardsley, this origin “can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem” He intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it.

It could also include historical information or wimstt about the time period or culture when a piece of literature was produced. Wimsatt was interviewed, along with Walter J.