Affective Fallacy

Affective Fallacy.

Is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. ... Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley as a principle of New Criticism which is often paired with their study of the The Intentional Fallacy.

In an essay published in 1946, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley defined the affective fallacy as the error of evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader. As a result of this fallacy "the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment,tends to disappear," so that criticism "ends in impressionism and relativism." The two critics wrote in direct reaction to the view of I. A. Richards, in his influential Principles of Literary Criticism (1923), that the value of a poem can be measured by the psychological responses it incites in its readers. Beardsley has since modified the earlier claim by the admission that "it does not appear that

critical evaluation can be done at all except in relation to certain types of effect that aesthetic objects have upon their perceivers." So modified, the doctrine becomes a claim for objective criticism, in which the critic, instead of describing the effects of a work, focuses on the features, devices, and form ofthe work by which such effects are achieved. An extreme reaction against the doctrine of the affective fallacy was manifested during the 1970s in the development f reader-response criticism.