And here’s why: In literary criticism, the affective fallacy refers to incorrectly judging a piece of writing by how it emotionally affects its reader. In other words, if you think a poem about a three-legged puppy is poignant because it makes you bawl your eyes out, you’re wrong.

First defined in an article published in The Sewanee Review in 1946, the concept of an affective fallacy was most clearly articulated in The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt’s collection of essays published in 1954.

An important concept in New Criticism, coined by Wimsatt and Beardsley in an essay in The Verbal Icon, Affective Fallacy refers to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader.

Affective criticism or affectivism evaluates literary works in terms of the feelings they arouse in audiences or readers (see catharsis). The American critic Stanley Fish has given the name affective stylistics to his form of reader‐response criticism.

affective fallacy, according to the followers of New Criticism, the misconception that arises from judging a poem by the emotional effect that it produces in the reader.

intentional fallacy, term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it. Fast Facts. Related Content. Related Topics: philosophy of art affective fallacy.

Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term “intentional fallacy”; other terms associated with New Criticism include “affective fallacy,” “heresy of paraphrase,” and “ambiguity.”

Affective reading” is a bidirectional term that refers to both. reception and composition. In terms of reception, affective reading points to the impinging. sensation that the process or activity of reading enacts in synthesis with a reading body.

T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor. He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry and as the author of such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).

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. Wimsatt and Brendsley criticize the tradition of expressive criticism as intentional fallacy and pragmatic criticism as affective fallacy.

See Article History. Affective fallacy, according to the followers of New Criticism, the misconception that arises from judging a poem by the emotional effect that it produces in the reader. The concept of affective fallacy is a direct attack on impressionistic criticism, which argues that the reader’s response to a poem is

Affective Fallacy is an answer to impressionistic criticism, which argues that the reader’s response to a poem is the ultimate indication of its value. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the text was an autonomous entity, independent of both author and reader, and its merit and meaning was considered to be inherent and not attributed.

Fallacy Quotes. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the ‘growing edge;’ the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.

The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causesof the poem and ends in biography and relativism.