MA II English

Marxist criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818–83) and his fellow-thinker Friedrich Engels (1820–95), and especially on the following claims:  1. In the last analysis, the evolving history of humankind, of its social groupings and relations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its “material production”—that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods.  2. Changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage.  3. Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology —that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what...

This term, which had been coined by the American painter and poet Washington Allston (1779–1843), was introduced by T. S. Eliot, rather casually, into his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919); its subsequent vogue in literary criticism, Eliot said, astonished him. “The only way of expressing emotion,” Eliot wrote, “is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,” and which will evoke the same emotion from the reader. Eliot’s formulation has been often criticized for falsifying the way a poet actually composes, on the ground that no object or situation is in itself a “formula” for an emotion, but depends for its emotional significance and effect on the way it is rendered and used by a particular poet. The vogue of Eliot’s concept of an outer correlative for inner feelings was due in part to its accord with the campaign of the New Criticism against vagueness of description...

AFFECTIVE AND INTENTIONAL FALLACY AFFECTIVE AND INTENTIONAL FALLACY 2 In an essay published in 1946, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley defined the affective fallacy as the error of evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader. As a result of this fallacy “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear,” so that criticism “ends in impressionism and relativism.” The two critics wrote in direct reaction to the view of I. A. Richards, in his influential Principles of Literary Criticism (1923), that the value of a poem can be measured by the psychological responses it incites in its readers. Beardsley later modified the earlier claim by the admission that “it does not appear that critical evaluation can be done at all except in relation to certain types of effect that aesthetic objects have upon their perceivers.” So altered, the doctrine becomes a claim for objective criticism, in which the critic, instead ...

Intentional fallacy signifies what is claimed to be the error of interpreting and evaluating a literary work by reference to evidence, outside the text itself, for the intention—the design and purposes—of its author. The term was proposed by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), reprinted in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954). They asserted that an author’s intended aims and meanings in writing a literary work—whether these are asserted by the author or merely inferred from our knowledge of the author’s life and opinions—are irrelevant to the literary critic, because the meaning, structure, and value of a text are inherent within the finished, freestanding, and public work of literature itself. Reference to the author’s supposed purposes, or else to the author’s personal situation and state of mind in writing a text, is held to be a harmful mistake, because it diverts our attention to such “external” matters as the author’s biography, or psychologica...