THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY By W. WIMSATT, JR., and M. BEARDSLEY We might as well study the properties of wine by get ting drunk?Eduard Hanslick. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Download The Affective Fallacy Wimsatt And Beardsley Pdf free. Mandy Moore So Real Zippos here. Wimsatt and Beardsley on Affective Fallacy.

Wimsatt and Beardsley on Wimsatt and Beardsley on 'The Affective Fallacy' Terms for the critical methods attacked by Wimsatt and Beardsley in this essay: affective criticism; historical study of contemporary readers' response; Plato's inspirational model of poesis and reception; Aristotle's katharsis model of poetic effect; the 'Sublime'; physiological and psychological response theories 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 epistemological skepticism [... Which...] begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism [with the result that] the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.' A large and obvious area of emotive import depends directly upon descriptive meaning (either with or without words of explicit valuation--as when a person says and is believed: 'General X ordered the execution of 50,000 civilian hostages,' or 'General X is guilty of the murder of 50,000 civilian hostages.'

' [347] 'None of [the examples offered by the semanticists] offers any evidence, in short, that what a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anything except 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 has seemed to offer a scientific basis for one kind of affective relativism in poetics--the personal... A reader may likely feel either 'hot' or 'cold' and report either 'bad' or 'good' on reading either 'liberty' or 'license'--either an ode by Keats or a limerick. The sequence of licenses is endless.' Affective theory has often been less a scientific view of literature than a prerogative--that of the soul adventuring among masterpieces, the contagious teacher, the poetic radiator--a magnetic rhapsode Ion, a Saintsbury, a Quiller-Couch, a William Lyon Phelps. Criticism on this theory has approximated the tone of...