Wimsatt and Beardsley on Wimsatt and Beardsley on 'The Affective Fallacy' 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 [...
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.' A large and obvious area of emotive import depends directly upon descriptive meaning (either with or without words of explicit valuation--as when a person says and is believed: 'General X ordered the execution of 50,000 civilian hostages,' or 'General X is guilty of the murder of 50,000 civilian hostages.' ' [347] 'None of [the examples offered by the semanticists] offers any evidence, in short, that what a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anything except what it means [denotative meaning], or if this connection is not apparent, at the most, by what it suggests [connotative meaning].' [348] 'The doctrine of emotive meaning propounded recently by the semanticists has seemed to offer a scientific basis for one kind of affective relativism in poetics--the personal... A reader may likely feel either 'hot' or 'cold' and report either 'bad' or 'good' on reading either 'liberty' or 'license'--either an ode by Keats or a limerick. The sequence of licenses is endless.'
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY By W. WIMSATT, JR., and M. BEARDSLEY We might as well study the properties of wine by get ting drunk?Eduard Hanslick. Intentional Fallacy William K. Beardsley >FAC, revised in >FBA Theclaimoftheauthor’s“intention”uponthecritic’sjudgementhasbeenchal.
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. Criticism on this theory has approximated the tone of...
The revival meeting... The sincerity of the critic becomes an issue, as for the intentionalist the sincerity of the poet.'
[351] '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.' [353] 'Certain theorists, notably [Ivor] Richards, have anticipated some difficulties of affective criticism by saying that it is not intensity of emotion that characterizes poetry... But the subtle quality of patterned emotions which play at the subdued level of disposition or attitude. We have psychological theories of aesthetic distance, detachment, or disinterestedness.
A criticism on these principles has already taken important steps towards objectivity.' [353] ' as it deals with an emotion which the speaker at first seems not to understand, might be thought to be a specifically emotive poem. 'The last stanza,' says [New Critic, Cleanth] Brooks, in his recent analysis, 'evokes an intense emotional response from the reader.'
But this statement is not really a part of Brooks' criticism of the poem--rather a witness of his fondness of it. 'The second stanza'--Brooks might have said at an earlier point in his analysis--'gives us a momentary vivid realization of past happy experiences, then makes us sad at their loss. Alvin Toffler Powershift Pdf Merge. ' But he says actually: 'The conjunction of the qualities of sadness and freshness is reinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol--the light on the sails of a ship hull down--has been employed to suggest both qualities.'