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.

1. The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Download Free
2. The Affective Fallacy Pdf
3. The Intentional Fallacy Wimsatt

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.

Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985) was born and raised in Bridgeport,Connecticut, and educated at Yale University (B.A. 1939).He taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Mt.Holyoke College and Yale University, but most of his career was spentat Swarthmore College (22 years) and Temple University (16 years).Beardsley is best known for his work in aesthetics—and thisarticle will deal exclusively with his work in that area—but hewas an extremely intellectually curious man, and published articles ina number of areas, including the philosophy of history, action theory,and the history of modern philosophy.Three books and a number of articles form the core of Beardsley's workin aesthetics. Of the books, the first, Aesthetics: Problems in thePhilosophy of Criticism (1958; reissued with a postscript, 1981), isby far the most substantial, comprehensive, and influential. More thanthat, it's also the first systematic, well-argued, and criticallyinformed philosophy of art in the analytic tradition. Given the widerange of topics covered in Aesthetics, the intelligent andphilosophically informed treatment accorded them, the historicallyunprecedented nature of the work, and its effect on subsequentdevelopments in the field, a number of philosophers, including some ofBeardsley's critics, have argued that Aesthetics is the mostimpressive and important book of 20 th century analyticaesthetics.The Possibility of Criticism, the second of the three books,is more modest in scope and less groundbreaking. Exclusively concernedwith literary criticism, it limits itself to four problems: the‘self-sufficiency’ of a literary text, the nature ofliterary interpretation, judging literary texts, and bad poetry.The last of the books, The Aesthetic Point of View, is acollection of papers, most old, some new.

Fourteen papers, largely onthe nature of the aesthetic and art criticism, are reprinted, and sixnew pieces are added. The new pieces are of special interest, becausethey constitute Beardsley's final word on the topics covered, and thetopics are themselves central ones: aesthetic experience, thedefinition of art, judgments of value, reasons in art criticism,artists' intentions and interpretation, and art and culture. In Aesthetics, Beardsley develops a philosophy of art that issensitive to three things: (i) art itself and people'spre-philosophical interest in and opinions about art, (ii) critics'pronouncements about art, and (iii) developments in philosophy,especially, though not exclusively, those in the analytictradition. To explain each of these elements further: (i) In the late1940s and early 1950s, the time at which Beardsley developed hisphilosophy of art, there were developments in the arts—new formsin music, painting, and literature had appeared and wereappearing—but there was also a well established and relativelylarge canon of works almost universally regarded as aestheticallysuperior and worthy of attention. (ii) Art criticism had become anindustry, with major schools of all sorts flourishing: Marxist,Formalist, psychoanalytic, semiotic, historical, biographical. (iii)And philosophy had changed in rapid and unexpected ways.

Analyticphilosophy, with its emphasis on language and strong empiricisttendencies, had gained ascendancy in American universities in littlemore than 20 years, and dominated the philosophical scene.Beardsley responded to each of the three. His position on developmentsin the arts is probably best described as open-minded moderation. Hewelcomed new developments, and reference to new works and works thatlack the luster of fame, notoriety, or ready recognition appearfrequently in Aesthetics and his other work.

He didn'tautomatically embrace the latest fad, fashion, or movement, however,but tried, as he said, to get something out of a work.As for art criticism, the school of criticism that attractedBeardsley, and that his philosophy of art ultimately underwrites, isthe so-called New Criticism. The New Criticism made the literary workthe center of critical attention, and denied, or at least greatlydevaluated, the relevance of facts about the origin of literary works,their effects upon individual readers, and their personal, social, andpolitical influence. Close reading is what is required of a critic,not biographical information about the author, a rundown of the stateof society at the time the work was written, data about the psychologyof creation, predictions about the effects of the work on society, andcertainly not a piece of autobiography detailing the critic's ownpersonal response to the work. Though based in literary criticism, theNew Criticism could be, and should be, extended to the other arts,Beardsley thought: all art criticism should make a serious effort torecognize its objects as special, autonomous, and important in theirown right, and not subservient to ulterior aims or values; all artcriticism should attempt to understand how works of art work, and whatmeanings and aesthetic properties they have; all art criticism shouldstrive for objective and publicly accessible methods and standards totest its pronouncements.Developments in philosophy were a different story.

Beardsley embraceda general form of analytic philosophy not heavily influenced by eitherlogical positivism or ordinary language philosophy, the dominantmovements of the time. For him, an analytic approach to the philosophyof art meant no more than critically examining the fundamentalconcepts and beliefs underlying art and art criticism. Doingphilosophy of that sort required clarity, precision, and a good eyefor identifying, exposing, and evaluating arguments, but leftaesthetics, as a systematic study, a real possibility.Not all the arts could be covered in detail in even so long a book asAesthetics—it's over 600 pages—so Beardsley hadto content himself with concentrating on three relatively disparatearts: literature, music, and painting. In keeping with the conceptionof philosophy mentioned above, aesthetics was thought of asmeta-criticism. “There would be no problems of aesthetics,” Beardsleysays, “if no one ever talked about works of art. We can't doaesthetics until we have some critical statements to work on”(pp. Aesthetics is concerned with “the nature and basis ofcriticism, just as criticism itself is concerned with works of art”(p.

The then-current and still widespread view that philosophy isa second-order, meta-level, and essentially linguistic activity,taking as its object of study the pronouncements of first-orderactivities, such as chemistry, religion, or history, is reflected inBeardsley's view on the nature of aesthetics.Critical statements are of three kinds, Beardsley thinks: descriptive,interpretative, and evaluative. The first concerns non-normativeproperties of works of art that are simply in it, in some sense, andare available, at least in principle, to anyone of normal eyes andears if sufficiently sensitive, attentive, and experienced.‘There is a small red patch in the upper right-hand corner ofthe painting’ is a descriptive statement, but so is‘Haydn's 23rd Symphony abounds in dynamictension.’ The philosophical problems that descriptive statementsgive rise to involve the concept of form, Beardsleythinks. Interpretative statements are also non-normative, but concernthe ‘meaning’ of a work of art, with ‘meaning’here referring to a semantic relation, or at least a purportedsemantic relation, between the work and something outside it.‘That's a picture of Notary Sojac’ is an interpretativestatement, as are ‘That's a picture of a unicorn,’‘The passage refers to Brutus's betrayal of Caesar,’ and‘The thesis of Macbeth is exceedingly simple: Thoushalt not kill.’ Last, critical evaluations are normativejudgments that basically say that a work of art is good or bad, or howgood or bad it is. ‘Mozart's Turkish March is anexcellent short piano piece’ is a critical evaluation, and so is‘ The Face on the Barroom Floor is wretchedverse.’ The judgment ‘This is beautiful’—theparadigm of a judgment of taste, according to Kant—is sometimesthought of as a critical evaluation (p.

9), but more often (e.g.,pp. 463, 507), and always in Beardsley's later writing, as adescriptive judgment, and one that frequently forms at least a partialbasis for a critical evaluation.The first chapter of Aesthetics is in part devoted to theontology of art—or aesthetic objects, as Beardsley was then wontto say.

The term ‘work of art’ was largely avoided by himat the time, because, as he later admitted, he did “not want tobecome enmeshed in the question of the definition of‘work of art,’ a question that had notconvinced him of its importance or promised any verysatisfactory and agreeable resolution” (p. Xviii).The ontology argued for begins with a distinction between physicalobjects and perceptual objects. In speaking of a thing being six feetby six feet in size and at rest, we're speaking of a physical object;in speaking of a thing being dynamic and frightening, we're speakingof a perceptual object. Perceptual objects are the objects weperceive, objects “some of whose qualities, at least, are open todirect sensory awareness” (p. Aesthetic objects are a subset ofperceptual objects. This doesn't necessarily mean that aestheticobjects aren't physical objects, however.

Aesthetic objects might beother than physical objects—the conceptual distinction mightmark a real distinction—or they might be physicalobjects—the conceptual distinction, though somewhat misleadinglycouched in terms of objects, might simply mark “two aspects of thesame” thing (p. At first indifferent as to which alternative isopted for—Beardsley mentions that he doesn't “see that it makesmuch difference which terminology that of objects or aspects ischosen” (p. 33)—he then proceeds to develop an ontology thatstresses objects more than aspects.The ontology is phenomenalistic in its leanings, though open to a morephysicalistic interpretation. A presentation of an aesthetic object isdefined as the object as experienced by a particular person on aparticular occasion.

Essentially, presentations are sense-data ofaesthetic objects. Aesthetic objects aren't presentations, however,for that would invite not just an uncontrollable population explosionof aesthetic objects, but chaos in criticism; and neither areaesthetic objects classes of presentations, for aesthetic objects musthave at least some perceptual properties, but classes, as abstractentities, have none. However, “whenever we want to say anything aboutan aesthetic object, we can talk about its presentations”(p. This, Beardsley says, “does not ‘reduce’ theaesthetic object to a presentation; it only analyzes statementsabout aesthetic objects into statements about presentations”(p. Primary Literature. Beardsley, Monroe.

Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy ofCriticism, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,Inc., 1981. Beardsley, Monroe. The Possibility of Criticism. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1970. Beardsley, Monroe.

The Aesthetic Point of View. Ithaca,New York: Cornell University Press, 1982. Beardsley, Monroe and William K. “The IntentionalFallacy.” Reprinted in Joseph Margolis, ed., Philosophy Looks atthe Arts, 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1987. Beardsley, Monroe and William K. “The Affective Fallacy.”Reprinted in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory sincePlato.

The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf Download Free

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.Secondary Literature. Davies, Stephen, 2005, “Beardsley and the Autonomy of the Workof Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63:179–83. Dickie, George, 1965, “Beardsley's Phantom AestheticExperience,” Journal of Philosophy, 62:129–36. –––, 1987, “Beardsley, Sibley, and CriticalPrinciples,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,46: 229–37. –––, 2005, “The Origins of Beardsley's Aesthetics,”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63: 175–8. Dickie, George and W. Kent Wilson, 1995, “The IntentionalFallacy: Defending Beardsley’” Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism, 53: 233–50.

Feagin, Susan L., 2010, “Beardsley for the Twenty-FirstCentury,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 44 (1):11–18. Fisher, John (ed.), 1983, Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives onthe Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress.

The Affective Fallacy Pdf

Goldman, Alan, 2005, “Beardsley's Legacy: The Theory ofAesthetic Value,” Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, 63: 185­–9. Hirsch, E.D.

The Intentional Fallacy Wimsatt

Validity in Interpretation. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1967. Iseminger, Gary, 2004, The Aesthetic Function of Art,Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 2005, “Beardsley's Approach,”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63: 191–5. Zangwill, Nick, 2001, The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca:Cornell University Press.