The New Criticism

The New Criticism

•Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy (NATC, 1371-1403)
•Brooks, “The Well-Wrought Urn” (NATC, 1350-65)

Wimsatt and Beardsley stress that the meaning of literary work “is not equivalent to its effects, especially its emotional impact, on the reader” (1371). So what’s important? New Criticism is defined by the emphasis of details when analyzing a text, a movement heavily relied upon for the study of literature and poetry. By examining its structure, imagery, and ambiguities, New Criticism critics found the relevant meaning of the text, disregarding the historical setting or author’s intent as reference.

This 20th century dominating literary criticism has been broken down into two descriptive parts, The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy. Wimsatt and Beardsley define poetry as an impersonal art. They believe that the focus should be on the text itself, “one must attend only to the organization of the words on the page and the coherence that the words do or do not posses” (1272). Extraneous references to psychology, social history, author, or period should be disregarded to hone in on the intrinsic matters of a text. Utilizing this approach, the Intentional Fallacy can best be defined as the assumption that the meaning intended by the author is of primary importance, subject to the internal evidence present inside a given work. This interpretation measures the work against something outside of the author: internal evidence, external evidence, and contextual evidence. Allusiveness, however, challenges the premise of intentionalism, a method which cannot provide a certain conclusion.

The Affective Fallacy derives from the standard of criticism, psychological effects of the text, and ends in impressionism and relativism. Confusion between the text and its results, or the Affective
Fallacy, is “a special case of epistemological skepticism…the text itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear” (1388). It is therefore a reference to a supposed error of judging or evaluation of a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. This concept was a direct result of impressionistic critic’s responses, who believed that the ultimate indication of a text’s value was the reader’s response. Although New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley advocated the unique nature of poetic language, this antithesis (Affective Fallacy) was needed to elucidate the thematic and stylistic ‘language’ of each text, without outside reference to history, biography, and reader-response.