Irony As A Principal Of Structure

The Intentional and Affective Fallacy by Whimsatt and Beardsley

William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. (November 17, 1907 – December 17, 1975) was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic.

Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to discuss the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.^[1]

Wimsatt was influenced by Monroe Beardsley, with whom he wrote some of his most important pieces.

Wimsatt also drew on the work of both ancient critics, such as Longinus and Aristotle, and some of his own contemporaries, such as T. S. Eliot and the writers of the Chicago School, to formulate his theories, often by highlighting key ideas in those authors' works in order to refute them.

Wimsatt's ideas have affected the development of reader-response criticism, and his influence has been noted in the works of writers such as Stanley Fish, and in works such as Walter Benn Michaels' and Steven Knapp’s “Against Theory” (Leitch et al. 1373-1374

Aubrey Beardsley was a 19th-century English artist and illustrator. He was associated with Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic movement in art .

Aubrey Beardsley was born on August 21, 1872 in Brighton, Sussex, England. With only minimal art training, Beardsley was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur.

 His highly erotic illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salomé won him notoriety but lead to a loss of work after the Wilde scandal. Beardsley, who had contracted tuberculosis at age 6, died in 1898 at age 25.

 Wimsatt and Breadsley have made best-known accusations of fallacy found in literary criticism based on writer’s intention and reader's response. International fallacy is a kind of mistake of deriving meaning of the text in terms of author’s intention, feeling, emotion, attitude, biography and situation. It is the error of interpreting a literary work by reference to evidence according to the intention of the author.

            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.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 Breadsley 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.