Intentional Fallacy: “design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” intention: what he intended, “design or plan in the author’s mind. To insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard.” 2. How does a critic expect to get an answer to the question of intention. The text should be evidence enough, and shows what he did if not what he meant to do. The poem must work b/c it can only be through its meaning.

• Define The Term Affective Fallacy
• The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Converter Pdf
• The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Converter Full

It is and we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. P succeeds or fails b/c what is irrelevant has been excluded. Not like practical messages. Meaning of a poem may be personal, but we ought to attribute the thoughts and attitudes of a poem to the speaker, and if to the author at all, only by a biographical act of inference. His former specific intention was not his intention if he has re-written or edited. Poem detatched from the author and moves about without his control. Belongs to the public.

Poet not an authority on the work. They maintain that criticism is properly: “whether the work of art ‘ought ever to have been undertaken at all’ and so ‘whether it is worth preserving.’” This, as opposed to whether the author achieved his intention.

Should describe in terms that may be publicly tested. Poets themselves say that poetry ought to come naturally like leaves on trees, and is written as Plato said, through inspiration and genius, lava of the imagination, or emotion recollected in tranquility (wordsworth). They write themselves like Shelley claims.

“The day may arrive when the psychology of composition is unified with the science of evaluation, but so far they are separate.” The implication seems to be that since they write themselves, or arise from the subconscious, there is no intention anyway, they just sort of come up. “The evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against something outside the author.” Criticism of poetry different from author psychology. Do not confuse personal and poetic studies, or write the personal as if it were poetic. Three kinds of evidence: internal, external, intermediate. Internal is also public; discovered through semantics and syntax. External is private or idiosyncratic; consists of revelations of journals and letters, about why the poet wrote. Meanings of words that were private or semi-private for an author, character of the author, & c.

2 and 3 blend into one another. Use of biographical evidence doesn’t need to include intentionalism b/c it may be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utterance. 3 is a bad kind of evidence.

Perhaps a knowledge of Donne’s interest in astronomy can add another shade of meaning to a poem, but it disregards the language itself. The poem still must be dealt with.

It has gotten to the point that we think we haven’t gotten to the bottom of a poem unless we’ve traced the poet’s reading. Like Eliot and The Golden Bough.

This is a sort of protest against what they want to call allusiveness, meaning the poet’s allusions to other works as the site of criticism. “Eliot’s allusions work when we know them—and to a great extent even when we do not know them, through their suggestive power.” In other words, you don’t need the allusions, they create their own background. Notes explaining these seem to justify themselves as external indexes to the author’s intentions, yet they ought to be judged like any other part of the composition, and when this happens their reality may come into question. “As a poetic practice allusiveness would appear in some recent poems as an extreme corollary of the romantic intentionalist assumption, and as a critical issue it challenges and brings to light in a special way the basic premise of intentionalism.” When dealing with allusions, they want us to track down texts and see whether they are truly relevant or not, and whether they really affect our understanding of the poet or not, rather than tracking down the author and asking him, because his answers are not relevant to the poem itself – critical inquiries are critical, not consulting the oracle. FROM THE NEXT SECTION: THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY IS A CONFUSION BETWEEN THE POEM AND ITS ORIGINS, A SPECIAL CASE OF WHAT PHILOSOPHERS CALL THE GENETIC FALLACY.

Define The Term Affective Fallacy

It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism.Affective Fallacy: the AF is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepticism. 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 is that the poem itself tends to disappear. Richards discussed emotive vs.

Referential-symbolic language and urged their separation. We project feelings at objects that are themselves innocent of causing them. Meaning and suggestive references of words are descriptive/cognitive functions of words. A word may mean or suggest, or do both, the one being more specific than the other.

Emotive: no rule to stabilize responses, and therefore no distinction between meaning and suggestion. Emotive meaning is independent of descriptive or cognitive meaning. License and liberty have very similar descriptive meanings, but vastly different descriptive suggestions. “Emotive meaning” and “feeling,” do not refer to any such cognitive meaning as that conveyed by the name of an emotion; anger, for instance. Expletives, “oh,” “ah!,” & c. Have no descriptive meanings and only the vaguest emotive import.

A large part of emotive import depends directly on descriptive meaning. Also, a great deal of emotive import that does not rely on descriptive meaning, does rely on descriptive suggestion. No evidence that what a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anything except what it means, or if that connection is not apparent, what it suggests. Anthropologists tell us that emotional responses vary widely through history and throughout the world.

Cultural relativity. Emotion fortifies opinion in surprising proportions given the small amount of evidence for that opinion.

These emotional opinions are not reasons, though. Peachtree complete accounting 2006 free download 2016 - and software. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, they claim, is an incidence of affective theory. It speaks more about oneself than the work.

Many examples of affective theory that they want to throw out, including Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief. Affective theory has produced very little criticism, though. The reports of readers who have strange experiences (emotions, heightened consciousness, whatever) can neither be refuted nor taken into account. If an affective critic tries to say what a line of poetry does, either the statement will be abnormal or false, or it will be a description of the meaning of the line. That a poem evokes an emotional response is not a criticism of the poem but a testament to his fondness for it. Emotive vs cognitive criticisms will be vastly different.

Critic deals with meaning of the poem, not the resultant actions or sensations. Arnold claimed that poetry attaches the emotion to the idea, but doesn’t explain how, and they are skeptical. Eliot finds Hamlet unsatisfactory because there is no chain of events that leads Hamlet to the emotions at which he arrives.

Emotion in excess of the facts as they appear. Objects cause emotions one of two ways: by their associations, or they are the literal reasons for those emotions: the crow kills small animals and feeds on carrion, and is black like the night when men commit crimes – this is associative. The murderer is the literal reason for the emotion of abhorrence.

Historical statement which may be a reason for emotion because it is believed, vs. Fictitious or emotive statement with a large component of suggestion. Poetry is about either suggestive symbols or the things themselves, but either way it is about things: how they are joined in patterns and with what names of emotion remains the critical question.

Poetry is about emotions and objects, or the emotional qualities of objects, and this through its preoccupation with symbol and metaphor. Not communicated to the reader like a disease, but presented in their objects and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge.

The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Converter Pdf

Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or making them more permanently perceptible when objects have undergone a functional change from culture to culture, or when as simple facts of history they have lost emotive value with loss of immediacy. Poems themselves are the most precise emotive evaluation of the customs.

The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Converter Full

Though cultures have changed and will change, poems remain and explain.