affective fallacy

 Affective fallacy

affective fallacy A term in NEW CRITICISM used to describe the error, from a New Critical perspective, of analyzing a work of literature in terms of its impact upon a reader. The critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term to call attention to the distinction between the text of a work and “its results in the mind of its audience.” For Wimsatt and Beardsley, any attempt to locate the meaning of a work within the mind of the reader “ends in impressionism and relativism.” A corollary fallacy, according to the same authors, the so-called INTENTIONAL FALLACY, lies in any attempt to see the meaning of a work as residing in the intention of the AUTHOR. For the New Critics, true meaning resided in “the text itself,” the language of the poem or story One of the principal developments of a more recent critical school, READER RESPONSE CRITICISM, in the words of Jane Tompkins, “defi nes itself in direct opposition to the New Critical dictum issued by Wimsatt and Beardsley.” “The Affective Fallacy” is included in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954); Jane Tompkins’s critique is featured in her critical anthology Reader Response Criticism (1980).