Wimsatt and Beardsley onWimsattand Beardsley on 'The Affective Fallacy'Terms for the critical methods attacked by Wimsatt and Beardsley in thisessay: affective criticism; historical study of contemporary readers' response;Plato's inspirational model of poesis and reception; Aristotle's katharsis modelof poetic effect; the 'Sublime'; physiological and psychological responsetheories 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 epistemologicalskepticism. Which. begins by trying to derive the standard ofcriticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionismand relativism with the result that the poem itself, as an object ofspecifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.' A large and obvious area of emotive import depends directlyupon descriptive meaning (either with or without words of explicitvaluation-as when a person says and is believed: 'General X ordered theexecution of 50,000 civilian hostages,' or 'General X is guilty of the murder of50,000 civilian hostages.' ' 347'None of the examples offered by the semanticists offers any evidence, inshort, that what a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anythingexcept 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 hasseemed to offer a scientific basis for one kind of affective relativism inpoetics-the personal.
The concept “affective fallacy” refers to a confusion between two elements of a literary text: what the text is (its linguistic and rhetorical elements) and what it does (its effects on the reader). Wimsatt & Monroe C. Beardsley first introduced it into literary criticism and theory in a 1946 article in Sewanee Review.
A reader may likely feel either 'hot' or 'cold' andreport either 'bad' or 'good' on reading either 'liberty' or 'license'-eitheran ode by Keats or a limerick. The sequence of licenses is endless.' Affective theory has often been less a scientific view ofliterature than a prerogative-that of the soul adventuring among masterpieces,the contagious teacher, the poetic radiator-a magnetic rhapsode Ion, aSaintsbury, a Quiller-Couch, a William Lyon Phelps. Criticism on thistheory has approximated the tone of. The revival meeting. Thesincerity of the critic becomes an issue, as for the intentionalist thesincerity of the poet.'
351'The report of some readers. That a poem or story induces in themvivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, isneither anythingwhich can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective criticto take into account.' 353'Certain theorists, notably Ivor Richards, have anticipated somedifficulties of affective criticism by saying that it is not intensity ofemotion that characterizes poetry.
But the subtle quality of patternedemotions which play at the subdued level of disposition or attitude.We have psychological theories of aesthetic distance, detachment, ordisinterestedness. A criticism on these principles has already takenimportant steps towards objectivity.' 353' as it deals with an emotion which the speaker at firstseems 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 statementis not really a part of Brooks' criticism of the poem-rather a witness of hisfondness of it. 'The second stanza'-Brooks might have said at anearlier point in his analysis-'gives us a momentary vivid realization of pasthappy experiences, then makes us sad at their loss.' But he saysactually: 'The conjunction of the qualities of sadness and freshness isreinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol-the light on the sails of aship hull down-has been employed to suggest both qualities.'
Thedistinction between these formulations may seem slight, and in the first examplewhich we furnished may be practically unimportant. Yet the differencebetween translatable emotive formulas and morephysiological and psychologicallyvague ones-cognitively untranslatable-is theoretically of the greatestimportance.' 353-54; my underscore, boldface, and red for emphasis, click on the hyperlink toTennyson's 'Tears.' So that you can test their argument about whatthe poem means'The critic is not a contributor to statistical countable reports about thepoem, but a teacher or explicator of meanings.
His readers, if they arealert, will not be content to take what he says as testimony, but willscrutinize it as teaching. 354Paraphrasing Yvor Winters:. That there is a difference between themotive, or logic of an emotion, and the surface or texture of a poem constructedto describe the emotion, and that both are important to the poem. Wintershas shown, we think, how there can be in effectThere is rational progression and there is'qualitative progression,' in the latter, with several subtly related modes, acharacteristic of decadent poetry. 354-55, hyperlink leads to to Rochester's 'UponNothing'What we have is poetry where kings are only symbols or even a poetry ofhornets and crows, rather than of human deeds. Yet a poetry of things.How these things are joined in patterns and with what names of emotion remainsalways the critical question.
' The Romance of the Rose could not,without loss,' observes C. Lewis, 'be rewritten as The Romance of the Onion.356To the relativist historian of literature falls the uncomfortable task ofestablishing as discrete cultural moments the past when the poem was written andfirst appreciated, and the present into which the poem withits clear andnicely interrelated meanings, its completeness, balance, and tension hassurvived. A structure of emotive objects so complex and so reliable as tohave been taken for great poetry by any past age will never.
So wane withthe waning of human culture as not to be recoverable at least by a willingstudent. If the exegesis of some poems depends upon theunderstanding of obsolete or exotic customs, the poems themselves are the mostprecise emotive report on the customs. Inand in other works of art the historian finds his mostreliable evidence about the emotions of antiquity-and the anthropologist, aboutthose of contemporary primitivism. In short, though cultures have changed,poems remain and explain. 357, my underlining for emphasis; the hyperlinkwill take you toWallace Stevens' 'The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm'- usethese, in addition to the O.E.D., to explore 'an author's use ofa word, and the associations which the word had for him' Wimsatt andBeardsley, 'Intentional Fallacy' 339.A sample student's (flawed but serviceable) New Critical 'close reading'analysis of Wallace Stevens' 'The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm':Aaryn Richard,'Subject v. Object: The Condition of the Relationship Between Man and theWorld,' Parataxis Spring 2003, online at. Viewed 2/22/05.Bonus points: canyou detect in Richard's article any critical moves that Wimsatt and Beardsleywould have prohibited?
If so, what are they and on what grounds are theyprohibited?.