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.