INTENTIONAL FALLACY BY W.K.WIMSATT
W.K.Wimsatt
William Kurtz Wimsatt was a prominent member of Yale University's English department from 1939 to 1975, becoming a Sterling Professor of English in 1974. He was deeply involved in Catholic affairs and received numerous awards and honorary degrees. Born in Washington, D.C., Wimsatt was educated at Georgetown and Yale, where he earned his doctorate in English in 1939. He specialized in eighteenth-century literature and spent his entire teaching career at Yale.
Wimsatt authored several notable works, including "The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson" (1941) and "The Portraits of Alexander Pope" (1965). He is best known for co-authoring "The Verbal Icon" (1954) with Monroe C. Beardsley, introducing the concepts of "intentional fallacy" and "affective fallacy" central to New Criticism. Married to Margaret Elizabeth Hecht in 1944, Wimsatt had two children and enjoyed hobbies like painting and chess. He passed away in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1975.
Throughout his career, Wimsatt advanced through academic ranks at Yale and held various prestigious positions. He was active in many scholarly organizations and contributed significantly to literary criticism and theory. Wimsatt received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and honorary degrees from several universities. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to his work on eighteenth-century literature, Wimsatt wrote on various subjects, including Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot, and made significant contributions to the study of prosody and comedy. He edited and co-edited several important literary works and collections of essays.
William Kurtz Wimsatt passed away from a heart attack on December 17, 1975.
Monroe Beardsley
Monroe C. Beardsley was a significant figure in philosophy, especially known for his work in aesthetics, the study of beauty and art. His book "Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism" from 1958 was a big deal because it organized aesthetics in a new way. Beardsley had two main ideas: "metacriticism," which is analyzing art criticism, and "aestheticism," which says that only aesthetic qualities like beauty and harmony matter in art criticism.
He believed that art is valuable because it gives us valuable experiences. He thought these experiences, called "aesthetic experiences," are different from ordinary ones, like seeing a beautiful painting. Beardsley argued that the value of art comes from its ability to give us these special experiences. He said there are principles in art criticism that can help us understand what makes art valuable.
He didn't think the artist's intentions matter when we're talking about the value of art. He thought we should focus only on the art itself, not what the artist meant by it. Overall, Beardsley's ideas had a big impact on how people think about art and its value, even though some of his arguments are still debated today.
THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
The intentional fallacy is the idea that a reader cannot evaluate a literary work properly by trying to assume the author's intentions in their writing. Authors William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley explore this idea in their 1946 article "The Intentional Fallacy." They originally discuss the concept in terms of poetry; however, it can be applied to all forms of art. For example, if a painter were to paint what they intended to be a scene from the countryside with no hidden meaning, the people who are viewing the painting cannot make assumptions about what the painting means based on the painter's original intent. Another point worth noting is the use of the word "intentional" itself. To do something "intentionally" implies that one has specific ideas about how and why they will complete that task.
AUTHOR'S INTENT
Author's intent refers to the author's ideas about how their work should be perceived and evaluated. When someone asks what an author meant about something in a work of art, they are asking about the author's intent. Author's intent can easily be misunderstood by an audience. An example is an author composing a piece about the dangers of smoking. Their intent is to persuade their audience to abstain from cigarettes, but the tone used comes across as comical to their readers. While their intent is to persuade readers not to smoke, the readers perceive the writing as entertaining and are therefore amused by the piece. In this example, the author's original intentions are not expressed.
AUTHORIAL DEFINITION
Authorial definition is the concept that an author is the only one who can truly define the meaning of their work. Additionally, anyone who attempts to evaluate the work through a lens other than the authorial definition is incorrect in their perception of the work. This concept is controversial for many reasons. Firstly, there is always plenty of room for an audience to misinterpret what an author actually means in their writing, such as not understanding an author's use of irony or misinterpreting their tone. Additionally, this concept fails to consider that an author may not fully understand why they created their work in the first place. Even if they do fully understand, it is impossible for their audience to ever truly understand what they went through in order to create their work. This is because their audience does not have the author's exact experiences. In this way, the authorial definition can be a faulty lens through which to examine an author's work.
Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy": Summary
"The Intentional Fallacy" is an article authored and published in 1946 by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. Its premise is that readers cannot and should not attempt to evaluate an author's work through the author's intentions when reading literature, specifically poetry. Wimsatt and Beardsley begin with five propositions to introduce readers to this concept. The first proposition states that poetry does not come into existence by accident, but by an author's intention. The second claims that readers have no way of obtaining a reliable answer to the question of what an author meant by their poem because if the author succeeded in their writing, the poem itself is the answer. The third claims that poetry has meaning through the fact that it exists in the first place, and it needs no meaning outside of simply being. The fourth states that readers can find personal meaning in relating to a poem, but readers should now attribute their personal feelings about a poem to what the author intended for the poem. Finally, the fifth proposition explains that if an author is able to revise their work and better achieve their original intention, this means that what they thought was their original intention was not truly their original intention.
Wimsatt and Beardsley further explain that poetry succeeds because all irrelevant information has been filtered out, leaving only what is most important. They claim that a poem's meaning is always personal to its author, so readers may be able to relate to universal concepts and experiences that inspire the poetry, but they will never fully know the specific experience of the author who created the poetry. This means that by default, they cannot know the author's intent. If an author is able to revise their work to better achieve their original intent, it simply means that their original intention was not their true intention.
Wimsatt and Beardsley go on to state that poetry belongs to neither the author nor the reader once the author has written it. They claim that the concepts in the poetry are subject to public criticism and that the author has no ownership of those concepts outside of the actual poem itself. In this way, they defend their argument that an author's original intentions cannot and should not be considered when readers are evaluating the author's work.
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