The Intentional and Affective Fallacy

     Wimsatt and Breadsley have made best-known accusations of fallacy found in literary criticism based on writer’s intention and reader's response. International fallacy is a kind of mistake of deriving meaning of the text in terms of author’s intention, feeling, emotion, attitude, biography and situation. It is the error of interpreting a literary work by reference to evidence according to the intention of the author.

     International fallacy means the confusion between the poem and its origin. It is the fallacy because an author is not the part of the text; instead, text is public but not private. If a critic interprets text in terms of author’s biography, this interpretation is called subjective interpretation or criticism. But for Wimsatt and Beardsley criticism should be objective and textual, critic should not go beyond the text.

     Author can't control the text as soon as he writes. It becomes public. The critic should not interpret the allusion in terms of author’s intention. They claim that author's intended meaning is irrelevant to the literary critic. The meaning, structure, value of text is inherent with in the work of art itself; it is an object with certain autonomy.

     Affective fallacy means the confusion between the poem and its result. It is a way of deriving meaning of the text interims of affect of product up on the reader.

     Affective fallacy is the error of evaluating a text by its effect. As a result of this fallacy, criticism ends in impressionism and relativism and objective criticism becomes almost impossible. Theories of catharsis, therapy, didacticism etc, fall under the affective fallacy because they judge the poem in terms of its effect on the reader.

     Wimsatt and Breadsley view that text constitutes language. The meaning of test is public, not personal. The effect of the text varies from person to person and from reading to reading. Thus if the critic depends on the meaning produced by a single reader it will be a kind of mistake. As a text is an autonomous entity, the best way of deriving meaning is to analyze linguistics elements such as syntax, semantics etc, since the work of art has its own anthological status, and it should not be judged through the parameter outside the text.

     Wimsatt and Brendsley criticize the tradition of expressive criticism as intentional fallacy and pragmatic criticism as affective fallacy. They believe that a work of literature or text has ontology of its own. It is not only an autonomous object but also complete in itself. So it has no need to take support of writer's intention and reader's affective response to assert its being. It can have its meaning with in itself, by its own structure. So its own being should be the subject of critical study.

R.P. Blackmur     John Locke is one of the influential English philosophers and is best known for his epistemological and political views.He observes knowledge to have begun with simple sense perceptions and combining these in to complex abstract ideas. Read More...

Cleanth Brooks     As a New Critic R.P Blackmur thinks that, a text is autonomous whole. Any attempt to go outside the text to find meaning is what Blackmur denies. He wants to assign, a critics job in this essay on this very ground. He says that a work of art should be judged objectively independent of any attention of author and reader. Read More..

T.S. Eliot     The essay Tradition and Individual Talent is an attack on certain critical views in Romanticism particularly up on the idea that a poem is primarily an expression of the personality of the poet. Eliot argues that a great poem always asserts and that the poet must develop a sense of the pastness of the past. There is great importance of tradition in the present poem. Read More...

J.C. Ransom    Ransom main idea hare in the essay poetry: A Note on Ontology is to assert the ontological status of poetry. Ransom divides poetry in to two broad groups. One groups that talk about things. Another group that talks about idea. And the third group comes out of blending of these two qualities. Physical poetry, Platonic poetry and Metaphysical are the names for these groups respectively. Read More...

I.A. Richards     Richards shows an interest in the effect of poems on the reader. He tends to locate poem in reders response. The being of the poem seems to exist only in the readers. Poetry is a form of words that organizes our attitudes. Poetry is composed of pseudo statements, therefore it is effective. He talks about the close analysis of a text. Like a new critics, he values irony. He praises the irony and says that it is characteristics of poetry of higher order. In “The Forth Kinds of Meaning”, he talks about functions of language. Basically he points out four types of functions or meaning that the language has to perform. Read More...

Friedrich Von Schiller    Schiller is a German literary theorist and dramatist and a critic of modern civilization. In this essay, he deeply analyzed modern civilization, which emerged from the fountain of enlightenment. He examined culture of European enlightenment and found the tragic and miserable predicament of humanity. According to him, enlightenment emphasis on reason that leads to disastrous condition in which individual psyche becomes dichotomous, further more, he compares civilization of enlightened Europe with primitive Hellenic Greek civilization. Read More...