BrokenTurtle: New Criticism - Ransom, Richards, Beardsley, and Wimsatt

Big Portion Of The Project

Affective and Intentional Fallacies

Literary Dictionary: intentional fallacy

intentional fallacy, the name given by the American New Critics W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley to the widespread assumption that an author's declared or supposed intention in writing a work is the proper basis for deciding on the meaning and the value of that work. In their 1946 essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (reprinted in Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon, 1954), these critics argue that a literary work, once published, belongs in the public realm of language, which gives it an objective existence distinct from the author's original idea of it: ‘The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.’ Thus any information or surmise we may have about the author's intention cannot in itself determine the work's meaning or value, since it still has to be verified against the work itself. Many other critics have pointed to the unreliability of authors as witnesses to the meanings of their own works, which often have significances wider than their intentions in composing them: as D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Studies in Classic American Literature(1923), ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.’

http://www.answers.com/topic/intentional-fallacy

Wikipedia: affective fallacy

Affective fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley as a principle of New Criticism.

http://www.answers.com/topic/affective-fallacy (GREAT SITE TONS OF INFO ON NEW CRISTICISM)

Wimsatt and Beardsley--The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy

Criticism which takes account of authorial intention in a work is commiting a fallacy--the intentional fallacy.

The intentional fallacy "is a confusion between the poem and its origins . . . it begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism."

http://www.michaelbryson.net/academic/wimsattbeardsley.html

New Criticism

New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge. It has long been the pervasive and standard approach to literature in college and high school curricula.

http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/new.crit.html

http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60a/newcrit.html

Methods previous to New Criticism:
extrinsic analysis--historical/biographical,
moral/philosophical (New Humanist),
impressionist critics, expressive school

New Cristicism