Lit Interpretation - Wimsatt - "The Intentional and Affective Fallacy"

Wimsatt and Beardsley

1.     “The Intentional Fallacy”

a.     The intent of an author has no relevancy to critiquing literary art, which runs contrary to conventional theory.

                                               i.     Intent speaks to external facts outside the work.

                                             ii.     Intent doesn’t help to identify or solve literary issues.

                                            iii.     Intention is what the author wanted to achieve, who also has a natural liking of his own work.

b.     A list of statements the authors believe to be self-evident.

                                               i.     To say the mind is the cause of a poem does not justify intention as a standard for critiquing.  Cause is not the same as intent.

                                             ii.     The poem itself is the manifestation of the creative act and to the creative act the poem should be judged.

1.     If the poem conveys intent, then it intent is contained within the work.

2.     If it doesn’t convey intent, then one has to look outside the work for intent.

                                            iii.     Judging a poem has the same criteria as judging objects.  They must:

1.     Work,

2.     Most or all of its parts need to be relevant without extraneous parts.

                                            iv.     Poetry is a way to handle complex meaning all at once.

                                             v.     Dramatic inflection should be placed on the speaker, when a poem is read aloud.

                                            vi.     If an author revises a poem, then the original intent was sufficient or intended.

                                          vii.     The poem is removed from the author once it’s published and open for interpretation and scrutiny.

                                         viii.     Artistic criticism is objective and has the power to differentiate meaning and create value without the intent or knowledge of the author.

c.     Critiquing art is different than the acts that created them.

d.     The work is evaluated in public and outside the scope of the author.

e.     Types of evidence for meaning in a poem.

                                               i.     Internal – Our interpretation through the use of language.

                                             ii.     External – Information that is not part of the linguistic fact of the work.  Similar to stories or promotions.

                                            iii.     Intermediate – Character of the author that is attached to the poem through his style and use of language.

2.     “The Affective Fallacy”

a.     Understanding the fallacies:

                                               i.     The intentional fallacy describes the confusion between a poem and it’s origin or intent.

                                             ii.     The affective fallacy describes the confusion between a poem and its results; what it is versus what it does.

b.     The affective fallacy creates a critiquing standard based in the psychological and then proceeds to understanding through relative comparisons.

c.     Objective is lost through using the intentional or affective fallacy.

d.     Separating the emotive from referential meaning.

                                               i.     There is a distinction between what a word means and what it suggests.

1.     Use of a linguistic rule can determine what a word means, or describe its definition.

2.     There are no linguistic rules for emotive meaning of words.

3.     As such, there are no standards that can apply to both descriptive and emotive meaning.

4.     An argument can be formed that the term “emotive meaning” is a misnomer. 

a.     There is cognitive meaning and

b.     There is emotive expression.

e.     Emotive is close to the imaginative.

f.      The critic who judges on the emotive will have different opinions that the one on the cognitive.

g.     For literary understanding:

                                               i.     The more we can account for emotion,

                                             ii.     The closer we are to the reason for the emotion, and

                                            iii.     The better we can understand the impact on the audience.

h.     Emotions are attached to ideas that are attached to fact.

i.      Poetry is about emotions, objects, or the emotive quality of objects through symbols and metaphors.

j.      Using objective criticism gives emotion a solid objective of its own.

Works Cited

Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley.  “The Affective Fallacy”.  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. 2^nd ed. New York:  W.W.Norton & Co., 2010. 1246-1261. Print.

Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley.  “The Intentional Fallacy”.  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. 2^nd ed. New York:  W.W.Norton & Co., 2010. 1232-1246. Print.