Reception As with many concepts of, the concept of the affective fallacy was both controversial and, though widely influential, never accepted wholly by any great number of critics. 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. In practice, Wimsatt and the other New Critics were less stringent in their application of the theory than in their theoretical pronouncements. New Critical theorists stressed the unique nature of poetic language, and they asserted thatin view of this uniquenessthe 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. On the theoretical plane, the critical approach denoted as affective fallacy was fundamentally unsound because it denied the iconicity of the literary text. In this light, the affective fallacy ran afoul of the New Critics desire to place literary criticism on a more objective and principled basis. In practical terms, it makes reliable comparisons of different critics difficult, if not irrelevant.
#THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY PDF MERGE FULL#
Dx ball 2 full versionĪ 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 and as an instance of a type of criticism that relies on subjective impressions and is thus unrepeatable and unreliable.įor Wimsatt, as for all the New Critics, such impressionistic approaches pose both practical and theoretical problems. This definition of the fallacy, if strictly followed, touches on or wholly includes nearly all of the major modes of literary criticism, from s docere delictendo (to teach by delighting), s, and s concept of transport to late-nineteenth century and the contemporary.įor Wimsatt, the fallacy led to a number of potential errors, most of them related to emotional relativism. The concept was presented after the authors had presented their paper on The Intentionalist Fallacy.įirst 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, Wimsatts collection of essays published in 1954. 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. Concept The concept of affective fallacy is an answer to the idea of impressionistic criticism, which argues that the readers response to a poem is the ultimate indication of its value.
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