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Guide to Literary Terms Affective Fallacy Affective fallacy - the error of judging a literary work by its emotional effect upon readers or a confusion between the work itself and its results. The term comes from combining two words: affective, which means pertaining to emotional effects or natures, and fallacy, which means false or mistaken idea. In essence, avoidance of the affective fallacy demonstrates an attempt to create objective literary criticism, in which the critic is concerned with describing the rhetorical composition of a work— how it functions — rather than with describing the impact of a work — what it does — on the reader. www.enotes.com /literary-terms/37703   (138 words)

Intentional fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, is the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy," a critic suggests that the author's intention is not particularly important. Preoccupation with the author "leads away from the poem." According to New Criticism, a poem does not belong to its author, but rather "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Intentional_fallacy   (529 words)

William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Perhaps Wimsatt’s most influential theories come from the essays “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” (both are published in Verbal Icon) which he wrote with Monroe Beardsley. The Affective fallacy (identified in the essay of the same name, which Wimsatt co-authored with Monroe Beardsley, as above) refers to “confusion between the poem and its results” (Verbal Icon 21; italics in original). As with the Intentional fallacy, engaging in affective criticism is too subjective an exercise to really warrant the label “criticism” at all — thus, for Wimsatt and Beardsley, it is a fallacy of analysis. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/W.K._Wimsatt   (1465 words)

Hypotyposeis: Intentional Fallacy The intentional fallacy is usually explained that the meaning of a literary work is not to be judged from the author's intentions, which is external and private, but from the text itself, which is internal and public. The New Criticism's formulation of the intentional and affective fallacies are helpful correctives to the excesses of probing the author's biography on one hand or the relativism of readership on the other, but it's possible to go too far here too. This avoids the intentional fallacy because the meaning is presumed from a reasonable reader's response to the text, but it also avoids the affective fallacy, because the "reasonable reader" does not support any idiosyncratic reading any old person might come up with but what most people would understand. www.hypotyposeis.org /weblog/2003/12/intentional-fallacy.html   (702 words)

Literary Terms Affective Fallacy: (See also 'intentional fallacy')Wimsatt and Beardsley, who are associated with the New Criticism, introduced first this term in their essay "the verbal icon". Intentional Fallacy: (See also 'affective fallacy') Introduced by the theorists of New Criticism, the 'intentional fallacy' refers to the error of criticizing or interpreting a work of literature according to what the author's intentions could be. Wimsatt's essay "the intentional fallacy", where he writes: "A poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). www.geocities.com /shaichazan/Lit/terms.htm   (1865 words)

alembic: affective fallacy Posted by: IB Bill at April 27, 2003 07:25 PM An affective fallacy is what the adherents of the school of New Criticism used to call any emotion evoked by a piece of literature. Briefly put, an affective fallacy is to evaluate a poem on the merits of its effects on the reader, rather than on its practice of craft. As the AF is set in the context of a "fallacy" it must be intended to correct the concept that a poem can be judged by its 'affect' on the reader ie that it is fallacious to place the interpretation of a work entirely on the response of the reader. www.ashladle.org /archives/000119.html   (1909 words)

English Literature 1: Reader 1 - The Reader and the Text The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). The outcome of either fallacy, the Intentional or Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear. www.englit.ed.ac.uk /studying/undergrd/english_lit_1/Handouts/bb_reader1.htm   (504 words)

THE CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; THE 4 DEADLY FALLACIES, PATHETIC AND OTHERWISE - New York Times There were four of them, at least as far as I was aware -the pathetic fallacy, the fallacy of imitative form, the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy - and we wielded them as if they were a sword, a rapier, a dagger and a stickpin. And we were doubtless often guilty of the affective fallacy, which W. Wimsatt defined as the error of substituting one's response to a poem for what he believed to be the thought content conveyed by the rhetoric of the poem. The pathetic fallacy is another way of defining anthropomorphism, a useful reminder that the purpose of the world isn't necessarily to serve human ends. query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2DF1731F93AA35755C0A960948260   (677 words)

Literary Terms Affective Fallacy: ìAn important principle of New Criticism is the avoidance of what William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley called the Affective Fallacy -- the fallacy of confusing a work of literature with its effects on the reader. Pathetic Fallacy:Ý A term coined by the art critic John RuskinÖto describe the poetic attribution of human feelings to natural objects, such as trees and mountains. english.montclair.edu /isaacs/605LitResearch/litermFA02.htm   (8819 words)

davekehr.com It’s not the affective fallacy that’s been “banned” from academic criticism, but the New Critical idea (now imported into law as strict constructionism) that you can interpret a text without subjective bias and somehow dispassionately decipher what the author “meant” without any of your own biases or subjectivity or personality intruding on that process. The invocation of the affective fallacy does not extract all feeling from the work of art, but instead dismisses feeling that has already been bizarrely severed from the textures of the work (at least for purposes of argument or discussion). The fallacy of the affective fallacy is considering affect to be a fallacy in the first place. davekehr.com /?p=71   (7499 words)

Affective Fallacy   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21) The affective fallacy is a term used by two important Any one reader's private reactions to a text are likely to be biased and uncritical: a reader with certain personal associations will make connections that have nothing to do with the poem. Wimsatt and Beardsley were also responsible for formulating the intentional fallacy. www.english.upenn.edu /~jlynch/Terms/Temp/affective.html   (97 words)

Literature Network Forums - View Single Post - New horizons for literature?? Comes from the earliest of modern literary theory essays, 'the intentional fallacy' and 'the affective fallacy' by Wimstat and Beardsly. The intentional fallacy refers to what I was just talking about, that you cannot presume to know what the author was intending to communicate. The affective fallacy warns against judging a work by the feelings it invokes in the reader. www.online-literature.com /forums/showpost.php?p=60498&postcount=15   (185 words)

New Criticism The "Intentional Fallacy" is the mistake of attempting to understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary work. Such an approach is fallacious because the meaning of a work should be contained solely within the work itself, and attempts to understand the author's intention violate the autonomy of the work. The "Affective Fallacy" is the mistake of equating a work with its emotional effects upon an audience. www.lawrence.edu /dept/english/courses/60A/newcrit.html   (747 words)

Commentary Magazine - Revisionist Literary Criticism   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21) ...now, by an ironic historical reversal, both the formulations of the critical fallacies and the principle they were designed to serve are made to appear philosophically naive and inaccurate as well... ...Attacking from another direction, Stanley E. Fish** has turned the affective fallacy on its head and developed an "affective stylistics," according to which the reading experience requires of the literary * Reprinted in Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954... ...Although Hartman does not mention "The Affective Fallacy," he refers elsewhere to a "backlash" against Ruskin and Pater as well as France led by I. Richards, whose own style is rejected as a model because its "superstructure" is "the managerial imperative of what is now called Social Science... www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V61I4P67-1.htm   (3450 words)

virtuaLit: Critical Approaches Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of contemporary reader-response criticism, also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never what it does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as formalists assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if it were an object spread out before them. bcs.bedfordstmartins.com /virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_reader.html   (647 words)

New Criticism   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21) Thus, New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is intrinsic and should not be confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective dimension (its impressionistic effects on the reader). The "intentional fallacy" is when one confuses the meaning of a work with the author's purported intention (expressed in letters, diaries, interviews, for example). The "affective fallacy" is the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological or emotional responses of readers, confusing the text with its results. www.wsu.edu /~delahoyd/new.crit.html   (349 words)

new crit   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21) In their influential essays, "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) and "The Affective Fallacy" (1949) they efficiently removed both the author and the reader from interpretive reading. The term intentional fallacy suggests that it is a mistake to read a text in search of the author's intent, that the text, once written, holds a meaning specific to itself and not in what the author might have meant to convey through it. The term affective fallacy maintains that the reader should not be concerned with any personal or emotional investment in the text. www.uwplatt.edu /~ciesield/newcrit.html   (1453 words)

Beardsley's Aesthetics And in addition to "The Intentional Fallacy," there's also "The Affective Fallacy." In a paper bearing that name, and also co-written with William Wimsatt, Beardsley argues that a person's affective responses to a work of art are irrelevant to its descriptive, interpretive, and evaluative properties. Sentence meaning is primary on this theory, and word meaning secondary and derivative, since it's defined in terms of a word's contribution to the speech act potential of the sentences into which it can figure. Beardsley thought this theory correct and used it to argue that the intentional fallacy is indeed a fallacy. plato.stanford.edu /entries/beardsley-aesthetics   (3994 words)

Æ - Volume 1 : G. CURRIE, Art, the Mind and the Brain Belief in an "affective fallacy" seems never to have been as strong or as widespread as belief in the intentional fallacy, and today such broad-spectrum antidotes to psychologism generate little enthusiasm from analytically-minded philosophers. Most philosophers of art will say that art and the mind are closely linked, that the study of art must be to some extent the study of how the mind creates and is affected by art. It is a fascinating and difficult question to try to decide whether or to what extent the centrality to aesthetics of response dependent concepts of this and of other kinds renders aesthetics a "subjective-relative" enterprise, which is presumably what worried those who announced the affective fallacy. www.uqtr.uquebec.ca /AE/vol_1/currie.html   (1683 words)

Semiotics for Beginners: Glossary Affective fallacy: The so-called 'affective fallacy' (identified by literary theorists who regarded meaning as residing within the text) involves relating the meaning of a text to its readers' interpretations - which these theorists saw as a form of relativism. Intentional fallacy: The intentional fallacy (identified by literary theorists Wimsatt and Beardsley) involves relating the meaning of a text to its author's intentions. Literalism: The fallacy that the meaning of a text is contained within it and is completely determined by it so that all the reader must do is to 'extract' this meaning from the signs within it. www.aber.ac.uk /media/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html   (10768 words)

Wimsatt and Beardsley Wimsatt and Beardsley--The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy The affective fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) [WandB would probably accuse Burke's "sociological criticism' of being an example of the affective fallacy.]. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism." "The outcome of either fallacy. www.brysons.net /academic/wimsattbeardsley.html   (559 words)

Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. - book reviews Criticism - Find Articles Early in Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, Richard Gerrig recalls the disciplinary divide opened between psychology and literary criticism through Wimsatt and Beardsley's invocation of the "affective fallacy," the false hope of grounding criticism in psychological perspectives. Gerrig, an associate professor of psychology at Yale, recalls this moment to make amends with literary theorists: "in the decades since Wimsatt and Beardsley stated their objections," Gerrig writes, "researchers have made progress toward developing an experimental psychology of reader response that is not so easily assailed" (26). Gerrig's book seeks to take advantage of these trajectories, to offer an interdisciplinary beginning, and to start drawing together the insights of the two seemingly different research agendas in an attempt to redress the affective fallacy, finding common ground with literary critics in psychology's accounts of a reader's cognition. www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n1_v37/ai_16946541   (882 words)

[No title] Wimsatt, William K. "The Intentional Fallacy," "The Affective Fallacy." J. WILLIAM K. Assigned: "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy." "The Intentional Fallacy" Section I 1. What is the affective fallacy, and what effect does it have on literary criticism? www.ajdrake.com /wiki/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=88   (10092 words)

Wimsatt and Beardsley on Terms for the critical methods attacked by Wimsatt and Beardsley in this essay: affective criticism; historical study of contemporary readers' response; Plato's inspirational model of poesis and reception; Aristotle's katharsis model of poetic effect; the "Sublime"; physiological and psychological response theories of Semantics scholars. "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 [. affective theory has often been less a scientific view of literature than a prerogative--that of the soul adventuring among masterpieces, the contagious teacher, the poetic radiator--a magnetic rhapsode Ion, a Saintsbury, a Quiller-Couch, a William Lyon Phelps. faculty.goucher.edu /eng215/wimsatt_and_beardsley_on_AF.htm   (912 words)

WORDS OF ART: THE A_LIST AFFECT: In an essay in Social Text (Fall 1982), Frederic Jameson characterized the move from modernism to postmodernism as a move from affect to effect, from emotional engagement to slick superficiality. AFFECTIVE FALLACY: Once of great value to all types of expression theory and to Aristotelian catharsis, the notion that a work's value resides in the emotional affect it has on an audience has lost its lustre both for formalism and for postmodernism in general, though for very different reasons. ALLUSION: Passing reference to an event, object or person presumed to be familiar to the audience, most commonly to increase affective potential without extensive digression. people.ok.ubc.ca /creative/glossary/a_list.html   (7383 words)

Gale Group - Free Resources - Lit Central - Glossary Affective Fallacy(Also known as Sympathetic Fallacy.) An error in judging the merits or faults of a work of literature. Intentional Fallacy The belief that judgments of a literary work based solely on an author's stated or implied intentions are false and misleading. Critics who believe in the concept of the intentional fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufficient matter for interpretation, even though they may concede that an author's statement of purpose can be useful. vccslitonline.cc.va.us /drama/glossary.htm   (12419 words)

Shyam Ranganathan on How to Write a Philosophy Assignment   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21) Secondly, it is considered to be an informal fallacy of logic (ad hominim, or abuse of the person) that is frowned upon by philosophers. Third, the chances are that the philosophers that you are assigned to study are not idiots but important minds in the history of human thought. For a reference in a philosophy paper to be affective, the reference should specify the most precise pagination available to the reader. www.yorku.ca /srangan/Students.htm   (4523 words)

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