Unintended, Unaffected

Understanding G. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s

“The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy”

“A reader uncovers the truth of literature not by consulting the oracle but by looking carefully at the internal evidence of the text’s form.”

To attain an understanding of any piece of literary work, a reader needs to reject the idea of an author’s intention. Instead of being concerned with the author’s intentions or reasoning, the reader should use and rely upon their knowledge of linguistics and literary elements to form a conclusion regarding the ‘thematic focus and unity of the work.’

In their seminal tracts “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” American New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley consider three types of evidence to be used to interpret [and explain] literature.

Internal evidence—foremost the essential and useful—is one discovered through the semantics and syntax of the work. For instance, certain images or motifs can be found within the text itself—and also comprise elements of the structure of the text. The language, semantics, grammar and imagery are public knowledge and therefore of particular value in discovering the meaning determined by the text. Other readers can then debate and verify such analysis. Formalists agree that such preoccupation with the work’s internal components enables eventual understanding by the reader and the public.

The work is public utterance, not a private one that depends for its meaning on the intent or design of its author.

—from “The Intentional Fallacy,” 1946

External evidence, though observable like internal evidence, does not involve assessing the form of a work. For instance, when writer’s journals, manuscripts, correspondences or reported conversations are used to define the meaning of a literary work, such meaning produced is essentially a private revelation of limited public validity. Such critical interpretation is based upon private, idiosyncratic knowledge. As their example of intentional fallacy, John Livingstone Lowes’ extensive study of the sources of imagery and language in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—touching on the personal or cultural life of the author—provides little or no aid to understanding the meaning of the poem.

We cannot use the author’s intention, even when we possess information about it, to judge a literary work.

—from “The Intentional Fallacy,” 1946

Intermediate evidence, meanwhile, derived from the private experience of the writer, is about the character of an author or about private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author. Although such evidence clarifies words’ meanings, or imagery’s nuances within the text—and allows us readers to know how an author is apt to use a word or phrase, such can only distract the more primary internal evidence of a text. John Donne’s use of scientific terms in “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” illustrates this kind of distraction.

In sum, the intentional fallacy grows out of a romantic aesthetic dealing with private, idiosyncratic elements of literary composition. Instead, a good reader looks to text as a self-defining work that is unified by a variety of literary elements. This approach makes literary meaning accessible to any reader.

Wimsatt and Beardsley consider most the primacy of the internal elements in a literary work. While they consider that reader’s concerns about the author’s intentions or motivations in writing literature all fallacies, they focus on the work’s very elements—in the words’ meanings and the study of them plus the grammar—as the vital elements that help determine the meanings that help usher in understanding of the literary work.

The meaning of a literary work is not equivalent to its effects—especially its emotional impact—on the reader.

—from “The Affective Fallacy,” 1949

It is said that what the poem is one thing, and what it does is another. Thus it should be judged on the basis of itself, not according to its effects. All lines of inquiry are connected to the text, i.e. poem’s elements that account for the effects it creates. Classical objectivity, in other words, rules here.

Insisting on the organicism of the literary work, the formalist tract says that analysis must center on the text itself and the critic’s task is to “examine its linguistic structure and its aesthetic unity as an autonomous object. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the authority is the poem.

The poem itself shows what the poet is trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.

Furthermore, Wimsatt and Beardsley say that poetry is the expression of a writer’s soul or personality. It is an impersonal art—what matters is the text itself.  Therefore, one must attend only to the organization of the words on the page and the coherence that the words do or do not possess. Then, if information about the author or period is relevant, it will be in the poem. If it’s not realized in the poem already, then it is not relevant. True to the notion of affective fallacy, all references to psychology, social history and anthropology focused on extrinsic matters—are therefore considered extraneous. For these American New Critics, the text shapes and controls what we say about it. Meaning is in the text, not in the intention of the author, and not in the reader, either.

Wuuh! Man

Notes on Feminist Literary Criticism

One of the most developed critical movements towards the second half of the 20th century, feminist literary criticism has appropriated gender studies to its own field in the wake of its being co-opted in the academe and its existence in the mainstream literary criticism.

A part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities, it allows for no single feminist literary criticism—only half-dozen interrelated projects, namely—exposing masculinist stereotypes, distortions and omissions in male-dominated literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods; examining the forces that shape women’s lives, literature and criticism, from psychology to cultural history; and creating new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements.

In the history of feminist criticism, the following areas roughly correspond with these tasks previously said. From “Women reading men reading women, to “Women reading” to “Women talking” to “Women writing” to “on the margins, ”or the heterogeneity of women,” on and on and on, women’s issues have since gradated like never before.

New [Image of] Woman in Gilbert and Gubar
In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence: Anxiety of Authorship,” the woman in feminist literary rhetoric has been given a new perspective. Considering that the female is “dis-eased” by patriarchy, G & G claim that the anxiety of authorship compels a woman to write in lesser genres—such as diary, children’s books, merely mimicking men’s writing styles. There is the woman’s tendency is to hide herself in the guise of male when writing the major genres. Such concealment is strategy to confront fear brought about by dis-ease. Particularly significant is the madwoman image of Bertha Mason rendered in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rebellious energies are channeled through the character of the “madwoman in the attic.”

Here, the madwoman is considered the alter ego of the author. She is virtually the projection of the rebellious impulses not found in the usual heroine. It also enunciates the female writer’s self-division—torn to either accept patriarchy on the surface, or totally reject patriarchy underneath.

Gilbert and Gubar also say women also play hide-and-seek with the reader in an effort to work towards social acceptance. In brief, G & G tried to articulate how women could escape male ways of discourse.

Since G & G, female mythological characters are being re-studied and appropriated to this concept of the madwoman—and being thus given different interpretation. It is said that dominant images in women’s writing—pervasive in fiction—all promote the idea of imprisonment—enclosures, or similar ways of containing.

Reading Gilbert and Gubar, Toril Moi attacks the limitation of the former’s contentions, saying, “that all texts written by women become feminist texts.” In addition, G & G assume that patriarchy’s ideology is unitary and coherent. Coming from a contemporary feminist perspective, Moi say that like all ideology, patriarchy is incoherent and fragmentary.

In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, there are pervasive images of delusions of liberation or freedom. There is a part in the story where images of imprisonment fill to the brim. There are also significant traces of illustrating the womb as tomb—which strikes as another image of enclosure, imprisonment, and restriction.

A Feminist Poetics Project
Meanwhile, there had been attempts to shed light on the feminist criticism through the historization or periodization of the feminist literary tradition. One of which is Elaine Showalter’s “Toward a Feminist Poetics” which roughly maps out the history of women’s literature into three phases.

Showalter’s feminist poetics project was brought about by the absence of a clearly articulated theory of writing by women; and in the light of activists’ hostility to theory [which they consider all male, or male-dominated.

In the Feminine Phase [1840-1880] women wrote to equal intellectual achievement of the male culture and rather only internalized its assumptions about female nature. This stage is largely characterized by imitation of male writing. In the Feminist Phase [1880-1920] women’s writing protested against male standards and values, also advocating women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Protest and advocacy ruled the day here. In the Female Phase [1920 onwards], women are said to reject both imitation and protest—which they now consider dependencies—and instead turn to female experience as the source of autonomous art, extending its analysis of culture to forms and techniques of literature. The last phase can be considered self-discovery, which considers studying the female literary tradition not in isolation but in co-existence with the male tradition.

After mapping such terrain, Showalter comes to two ways to look at it. First, in the feminist critique, she acknowledges women as victims since when woman as reader comes to receive only images and stereotypes—which are considered misconceptions in literature. Then, she looks to gynocriticism, which considers woman as writer, and which carries with it the psychodynamics of female creativity.

According to Showalter, feminist critics must use cultural analysis as ways to understand what women write, rather than dictate what they ought to write. She recognizes that the critical task is to nurture a new feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that exists within the male tradition—but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable.

Showalter rejects both imitation and protest and approaches criticism from a cultural perspective of the current Female Phase—and not from psychoanalytic and biological theories. She suggests that approaching women’s writing from a cultural perspective is one among many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions.

Showalter rather coins gynocriticism one that’s based in a feminine perspective that seeks to “construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adopt male models and theories.” Showalter enjoins gynocritics to “free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.” Furthermore, in Showalter’s consideration gynocriticism is not to erase the differences between male and female writing—but to aim to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality.

Though she acknowledges that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female tradition, Showalter sees it as “a way to lean something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literature.”

Feminist Thought Integrates with Other Theories
Through time, the feminist literary has integrated with Marxism and similar strains of thought that seek to debunk domination by class or gender or race. Here it is important to note the Marxist-feminist collective which renders clearer reading to works written by men and women authors alike.

In particular, nineteenth century women writing exhibited the polarization of politics [revolutionary vs. conservatism] and genre [romanticism vs. social realism] through the works of such women authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte. In Jane Eyre, for instance, there had been tendencies in the women’s writing in this period that characterizes tensions. Pierre Macherey’s not-said element contributes to the essence of the story—the transformation, if any, of Jane Eyre’s character in Bronte’s novel.

In a Marxist-feminist reading of Jane Eyre, we see that feminism is in the not-said, or virtually the unconscious of the text. As overt manifestation, the sexuality is integrated within the symbolic patriarchy. On the surface, sexuality is tamed and appropriated within the social order or marriage. “Reader, I married him”  is Jane Eyre’s outright expression of submission to patriarchy.

While a Marxist perspective will think Jane Eyre’s class or social mobility is of primary interest in the novel, the liberal feminist thought will recognize that Jane Eyre’s conviction and struggle to get educated, and direct her efforts to make herself a fuller woman—totally independent  of a male—these all tell us in these contexts that openings and spaces are given for women to liberate themselves from the patriarchal order.
 

I Dialogues

Enunciating Louis Althusser’s Theses on Ideology

 

 

I.

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. (Lenin 109)

 

Whereas the old Marxist view showed how ideologies are false by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology, Althusser says, by contrast, ideology does not reflect the real world but represents the imaginary relationships of individuals to the real world. The thing ideology [mis] represents is itself already at one remove from the real.

 
Borrowing Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary, Althusser says we are always within ideology because of our reliance on language to establish our reality. This means—that different ideologies are but different representations of our social and imaginary ‘reality,’ not a representation of the real itself.

 

 

II.

Ideology has a material existence. (Lenin 112)

 

It is so because an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. Ideology always manifests itself through actions which are inserted into practices—e.g. rituals, conventional behavior, and so on.

 

Citing Blaise Pascal’s formule for belief—

 

“Kneel down, move your lips in prayer and you will believe, (Lenin 114)”

 

Althusser contends it is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that constantly instantiates us as subjects.  (cf. Newer critic Judith Butler’s preoccupation with performance/ performativity is inspired and/or informed by this thought on ideology.)

 

what thus seems to take place outside ideology (in the street, to be precise) in reality takes place in ideology. Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology (Lenin 118)

 

 

III.

 

All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. (Lenin 115)

 

Ideology’s purpose is in constituting concrete individuals as subjects (Lenin 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as true and obvious.

 

The rituals of ideological recognition guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and naturally irreplaceable subjects. (Lenin 117)

 

Through interpellation, individuals are turned into subjects (which are always ideological):

 

Police Officer: Hey, you there!

 

Assuming that the scene takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere 180° physical conversion, he becomes a subject. (Lenin 118)

 

The very fact that we do not recognize this interaction as ideological speaks to the power of ideology.

 

 

IV

Individuals are always-already subjects.

(Ideology has no history.)

 

Although his example of interpellation suggests temporality—I am interpellated and thus I become a subject, I enter ideology—Althusser says that the becoming-subject happens even before we are born. Not a paradox at all, even before the child is born—it is certain in advance that it will bear its father’s name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.

 

 Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived. (Lenin 119)

 

Most subjects accept their ideological self-constitution as reality or nature and thus rarely come into conflict with the repressive state apparatus, designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant ideology.

 

It can be said therefore that hegemony is thus reliant less on such repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) as the police than it is on those ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) by which ideology is inculcated in all subjects.

 

Althusser says it best, thus:

 

“the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the subjects, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’” (Lenin 123)

 

 

Understanding Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”

By adding the concept of ideological state apparatuses, Althusser complicates the Marxist notion of the relation between base and superstructure.

 

For Marx, various levels in society are the infrastructure or economic base and the superstructure or political and legal institutions (law, government, and the police) and ideology (religious, moral, political, etc.) In Marxist thought, superstructure is relatively autonomous from base—it relies on economic base but can sometimes persist for a long period despite major changes in the base.

 

Exploring the ways in which ideology is more pervasive, and more material than previously acknowledged, Althusser distinguishes between Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs).

 

ISAs include the religious (schools), family, legal, political (systems, parties), trade union, communications (press), and the cultural (arts, sports, literature). Less centralized and more heterogeneous, ISAs access the private, not the public realm. They work predominantly by ideology, including punishment or repression.

 

Schools and churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc. to discipline not only their shepherds but also their flocks. (Lenin 98)

 

State apparatuses (SAs), or Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) are agencies that function by violence, imposing punishment and privation in order to enforce power. Working predominantly by violence and secondarily by ideology, SAs include the government and administration, army and the police, courts and prisons, etc.

 

Though they are quite disparate, ISAs are virtually unified subscribing to a common ideology in the service of the ruling class. Indeed the ruling class must maintain a degree of control over ISAs to ensure stability of the SAs.

 

No class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the ISAs.

 

It is much harder for the ruling class to maintain control over the multiple, heterogeneous, and relatively autonomous ISA (alternative perspectives can be voiced in each ISA)—which is why there is continual struggle for hegemony/domination in this realm.

 

In what may seem to me as the repute of schools being [re] defined, Althusser says, “what the bourgeoisie has installed as its dominant ISA is the educational apparatus, which has replaced in its functions the Church.”

Author! Author!

Literary Authorship through the Ages

The concept of author, the so-called originator of a literary work—has undergone mutation in varying degrees and periods in history.

In the Middle Ages, the concept was attached to the auctores, those authors of certain books trivium and quadrivium, which were vital texts for young men of learning. Trivium refers to the three subjects that were taught first in medieval universities, namely: grammar, logic and rhetoric; while quadrivium comprised the four subjects, or arts, taught in the Renaissance Period, namely: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Like Aristotle, Ptolemy and the writers of the Bible, auctores were in the truest sense of the word—referred to those writers “whose words commanded respect and belief.” They stemmed from some sort of supremacy, enacting and making possible Divine Revelation to those who read them. As such, auctores established the ruling order, and sanctioned moral and political authority of the medieval culture. In the feudal age, authority was limited to the people in hierarchy, and thus truth and order and meaning.

Further on, the Exploration Age gave way to the existence of people who would later render meaning to Author As Discoverer, as a progenitor that explored the New World, and “brought home a quite different sensibility.”

Quite detached from the ruling order, making his own world overseas, and discovering different worlds away from the constraining auctores-dictated culture, the explorer became an originator in his own right, adding to his vocabulary some new words discovered in his explorations.

They became so-called new agents within a culture, as they were able to describe things in the New World, much as they were bound to declare their right to be represented “on their own terms,” rather than in the world of the ancient books, which had so defined their society in general. Such set of connections afforded the rising middle class the opportunity to try to redefine ways of seeing in social contexts.

Civil wars were good examples of the educated, fortified class who were as very well convinced by their new ideas as they were torn by the oppressive monarchical rules and similar cultures. They would become the modern auctores, much as they were revered in more ways than one—since they presented a “cooler” alternative to a rather monotonous, perhaps stifling world view that bordered on tedium or commonplace-ness.

After the establishment of a new alternative order, the author later came to represent the emancipation from the political life—this was one whose works belonged neither to economic nor political realms—it rather explored a cultural realm, with the author heading the so-called Republic of Letters.

Meanwhile, the Romantic Period and the expressive strains of creators of literature made possible the emergence of the Genius. Here the author’s function shifted. In the past, it helped usher in a political alternative, now it produced a cultural alternative to the world of politics. Then, we have to insist they were now the modern auctores because they were now the new order, with works being “elevated into exemplars and sources of value for the entire culture.”

To Matthew Arnold, for instance, literature became what is best thought and known in the world. The primacy of great men with great minds had to be insisted as the thing to reckon with, if society were to survive. In the face of massive social transformation and industrialization, the author necessarily transformed into one whose works became rather self-conscious or extremely esoteric.

Before the twentieth century, however, literary critics became the new interpreters of the concept of authorship, because the discussion departed from the author to the text.  The trend would go as far as to become a rather convenient escape from the real circumstances of daily life to oblivion. The emergence of the critic at a time when the author is said to be separated from his work ushered in views so as to render the author new meaning, or no meaning at all.

In effect, the author became the effect of critic’s interpretation; and most important, the author became “not the cause of the work.”

For the New Critics in the 1930s, the author was not the object of criticism. The so-called autotelic text (meaning:  “having a purpose in and not apart from itself”) is superior in itself—full of meanings or endless possibilities—because it is a self-contained universe.

Toward the 70s, taking off from whatever was left of the author by the New Critics, French Roland Barthes, proclaimed that the Author Is Dead: there is no author—that means not the literal death of the author but that the author is not the writer; and therefore it is a matter between function or activity.

For Barthes, author is to function as writer is to activity—the former concerned with and identifies with the language; the latter on its means. Literature then became a discursive game always arriving at the limits of its own rule, without any author other than the reader who, as Scriptor, is an effect of the writing game he activates.

Speaking Greek

Notes on Aristotle’s Poetics

While some critics primarily consider Poetics a counterattack to Plato’s banishing of poets from [in] the Republic, Aristotle’s treatise on art, poetry, epic, and tragedy clearly marks out the history of literary criticism. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle attempts to describe the social function and the ethical utility of art.

Poetics places emphasis on the formative nature of art—while predecessor Plato esteems idealism and abstractions as the highest forms of truth to gain wisdom, Aristotle stresses the importance or primacy of the particular imitations of nature.

According to Aristotle, criticism should not be simply the application of unexamined aesthetic principles in its context within the work—but should pay attention to the overall function of feature of a work of art. Therefore, Poetics lays bare the anatomy of art, as in a scientist—carefully accounting for the features of each species cited in the text—most forms by the way are the ones that existed during those times.

Exploring the forms of art during Aristotle’s time, Poetics particularly discusses the practical details of the forms of imitation, which he termed mimesis.  The treatment of the forms or modes of representation is meticulous as Aristotle presents as many definitions as the terms themselves. For instance, Aristotle goes into detail, when he cites the types of tragic plots. He also names specific terms to explicate that unity of plot is indispensably necessary. In Book 17, Aristotle gives poets some pointers on how to construct a tragedy—or how tragedy is constructed by playwrights who were awarded in Dionysian festivals.

Especially drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristotle cites the six salient parts of tragedy in order of importance—plot, character, thought, diction, music or melody and spectacle.  Zooming in on the good plots, Poetics prefers the plausibility and logically connected order centered on one unified action, simultaneously frowning on multiple, divergent plots which it also deems unnecessary. Poetics suggests that the best kind of resolution to these plots is one that shows a reversal (peripeteia) of position for the main character—and a character’s recognition (anagnorisis) of his or her fate. For best effect, so to speak, characters should come from high positions in order to render remarkable tragic circumstances, and their fates must be linked to their own error, and not some accident or wickedness (hamartia).

According to Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Aristotle’s seminal work on art renders us a number of implications for the modern critics.  

First, its systematic categorization of genus and species and its comparison of tragedy and epic are said to now underlie all genre theory—“undergirding modern considerations of the historical movement from epic to the novel. 

Second, its systematic description of plot and its component parts basically ground contemporary narrative theory, especially the technical field of narratology. 

Third, its scientific examination of poetry—championed by the American New Critics—rather just validates it as a legitimate branch of study.  Next, it affirms that poetry is a source of universal knowledge of human behavior, i.e. unlike history that produces knowledge of specific situations, poetry describes actions of characters who might be any human beings.  

Lastly, to which most critics agree, good poetry renders us catharsis, primarily read as purgation of unwieldy emotion. Through time, catharsis, roughly a sense of moral purification that arises in an individual from being exposed to tragedy has come to mean ethical or intellectual clarification.

Really, Speaking Greek

All art and poetry—representing what is already an inferior representation of the true original—only leads further away from the truth—and further into a world of illusion and deception. 

The above statement is said to sum up Plato’s sentiment in the Republic, an age-old treatise on philosophy which does not recognize the importance of poets and artists in an ideal, well-regulated community promoting respect for law, reason, authority, self-discipline and piety.

Between his student Aristotle and himself, the great Plato is notorious for being the idealist, while the son of the medical doctor is the pragmatic theorist.

Infamous for attacking mimesis, Plato rather explores the nature of knowledge and its proper objects.

Plato thus proclaims that the world we perceive depends on a prior realm of separately existing forms organized beneath the form of Good. According to him, the realm of forms is accessible not through the senses [as is the world of appearances] but only through rigorous philosophic discussion and thought based on mathematical reasoning.

For Plato’s Socrates, measuring, counting and weighing all bring us closer to the realm of forms, and not poetry’s pale representations of nature.

In an effort to censor Homer, Plato’s Socrates often cites Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, calling for the censorship of many passages in these works [because they] represent sacrilegious, sentimental, unlawful and irrational behavior.

Through Republic and his other works, Plato insinuates that literature must teach goodness and grace. Such relentless application of this standard to all literature, however, marks one of the most noteworthy beginnings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.