Summary: Wimsatt & Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy”
Editor’s Note: For this assignment, I needed to read and summarize the published piece or content listed below, and then provide a response or assessment of the writing.
Wimsatt, W.K., and M.C. Beardsley. “The Affective Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 1949, pp. 31–55.
Summary
Wimsatt and Beardsley define affective fallacy as “a confusion between the poem and its results.” They believed that affective criticism was essentially individual criticism and, therefore, not the best or most comprehensive criticism because each critic or reader could have a different interpretation of a poem based on the emotive meaning they derived from the text. Wimsatt and Beardsley go into detail explaining the difference between cognitive meaning (a standard dictionary definition for a word) and emotive meaning (the way a word makes a person feel) and how those meanings can vary from person to person. Emotion, they stated, “has a well-known capacity to fortify opinion, to inflame cognition, and to grow upon itself…,” which can result in an erroneous interpretation of literature. While discussing the branches of affective criticism, Wimsatt and Beardsley continue their argument that affective fallacy is subjective and does not offer valid criticism of any literary work, stating, “General affective theory at the literary level has…produced very little actual criticism.” Although they did not deny that literature could evoke emotion and emotive meaning with each individual reader or critic (and cited numerous literature examples), they placed no value on that assessed emotion because it was individual and varied from person to person, rendering it worthless.
Response
I found Wimsatt and Beardsley a more difficult read, but interesting in that they felt so confident and strong about their theory that they had no problem mincing words regarding their opinions of authors and other critics’ assessments of literature. I completely agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley that affective criticism is ineffective if the goal is to only provide criticism for the actual piece of literary work; however, because there are so many types of criticism—and these various types of criticism have a legitimate place in various environments—I wouldn’t discount affective criticism in its entirety. To me, affective criticism is like queso: it’s perfect to pair with certain foods, but you certainly wouldn’t dip everything you eat in a vat of queso. I think Wimsatt and Beardsley’s forceful essay made me realize that affective criticism is not perfect, it should not be applied to every piece of literature in all instances, and it is most definitely subjective; however, affective criticism can be valuable in certain instances with certain pieces of literature. In the classroom, I think it could be a great demonstrative tool to illustrate to students the chasm of difference between New Criticism and affective criticism. It could also be used to make students think about why the author may have chosen one specific word versus another word and how those two words elicit different emotive meaning even though their cognitive meanings are essentially the same.