Skip to main content

Affective Fallacy

AFFECTIVE AND INTENTIONAL FALLACY


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 of describing the effects of a work, focuses on the features, devices, and form of the work by which such effects are achieved. An extreme reaction against the doctrine of the affective fallacy was manifested during the 1970s in the development of reader-response criticism.

 From- A Glossary of Literary Terms - M. H. Abrams

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bakhtin and dialogic principle: Polyphony, Dialogism, Heteroglossia, Carnival

Dialogic criticism:  (From- A Glossary of Literary Terms- M. H. Abrams) Dialogic criticism is modeled on the theory and critical procedures of the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin who, although he published his major works in the 1920s and 1930s, remained virtually unknown to the West until the 1980s, when translations of his writings gave him a wide and rapidly increasing influence. To Bakhtin a literary work is not (as in various poststructural theories) a text whose meanings are produced by the play of impersonal linguistic or economic or cultural forces, but a site for the dialogic interaction of multiple voices, or modes of discourse, each of which is not merely a verbal but a social phenomenon, and as such is the product of manifold determinants that are specific to a class, social group, and speech community. A person’s speech does not express a pre-existent and autonomous individuality; instead, his or her character emerges in the course of the dialogue and is composed o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grand Narrative - Lyotard

Grand Narrative Grand narrative or “master narrative” is a term introduced by  Jean-François Lyotard  in his classic 1979 work  The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , in which Lyotard summed up a range of views which were being developed at the time, as a  critique  of the institutional and  ideological  forms of knowledge. Narrative knowledge is knowledge in the form of  story-telling . In the  tribal times , myths and legends formed knowledge of this type; that such-and-such a mountain was just where it was because some mythic animal put it there, and so on. The narrative not only explained, but  legitimated  knowledge, and when applied to the social relations of their own society, the myths functioned as a legitimation of the existing power relations, customs and so on. The great  religions  of the  feudal world  – Christianity, Islam and  Buddhism  – institutionalised this narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more