William K. Wimsatt
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to discuss the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.
Life and career
Wimsatt was born in Washington D.C., attended Georgetown University and, later, Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. In 1939, Wimsatt joined the English department at Yale, where he taught until his death in 1975. During his lifetime, Wimsatt became known for his studies of eighteenth-century literature. He wrote many works of literary theory and criticism such as The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson and Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the "Rambler" and "Dictionary" of Samuel Johnson. His major works include The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry ; Hateful Contraries and Literary Criticism: A Short History. Wimsatt was considered crucial to New Criticism. He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.Influences
Wimsatt was influenced by Monroe Beardsley, with whom he wrote some of his most important pieces. Wimsatt also drew on the work of both ancient critics, such as Longinus and Aristotle, and some of his own contemporaries, such as T. S. Eliot and the writers of the Chicago School, to formulate his theories, often by highlighting key ideas in those authors' works in order to refute them.Influence
Wimsatt's ideas have affected the development of reader-response criticism, and his influence has been noted in the works of writers such as Stanley Fish, and in works such as Walter Benn Michaels' and Steven Knapp’s “Against Theory”.Approach
Wimsatt was interviewed, along with Walter J. Ong, S.J., of Saint Louis University, by Sheila Hough on the 327th edition of the radio talk-show Yale Reports, broadcast on May 24, 1964, by WTIC-Hartford. Ms. Hough asked Professor Wimsatt a question that still resonates today: "Is literature taught in complete isolation from its author, Mr. Wimsatt -- don't you consider the person who wrote it?"Wimsatt replied: "I do, of course. Your question, I think, was prompted by that very fine essay of Father Ong's, 'The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,' which you read in his book The Barbarian Within . It first appeared in Essays in Criticism at Oxford some years ago , and was in part, I believe, an answer to an essay written many years ago, about twenty at least, by a friend of mine, Monroe Beardsley, and myself, called 'The Intentional Fallacy.' I would like to pay Father Ong the compliment of saying that I think that his essay 'The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn' is the only sensible response that has ever been written to that essay of ours."
As a staunch formalist critic, Wimsatt believed in the authority of the poem: any analysis of a poem must centre on the text itself. He outlines and advocates an “objective criticism” in which the critic essentially disregards the intentions of the poet and the effect of the poem on the audience as the sole factors in analyzing and evaluating a poem.
Wimsatt does allow for a certain degree of variation in the analysis of poetry and does not necessarily contend that there is only one possible reading for any given poem. He allows, for example, for what he calls the “literary sense” of meaning, saying that “no two different words or different phrases ever mean fully the same”.
Much of his theory, however, appears to stem from an ambivalence towards "impressionism, subjectivism, and relativism” in criticism. In Hateful Contraries, Wimsatt refers to a “New Amateurism,” an “anti-criticism” emerging in works such as Leslie Fiedler’s “Credo,” which appeared in the Kenyon Review. “The only reservation the theorist need have about such critical impressionism or expressionism,” says Wimsatt, “is that, after all, it does not carry on very far in our cogitation about the nature and value of literature…it is not a very mature form of cognitive discourse”.
Indeed, Wimsatt is concerned with ensuring a level of legitimacy in English studies and he sets about doing so by favouring a scientific approach to criticism—even, for example, decrying affective theory as “less a scientific view of literature than a prerogative -- that of a soul adventuring among masterpieces”.
Theories
Wimsatt contributed several theories to the critical landscape, particularly through his major work, The Verbal Icon. His ideas generally centre around the same questions tackled by many critics: what is poetry and how does one evaluate it?Intentional fallacy
Perhaps Wimsatt’s most influential theories come from the essays “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” which he wrote with Monroe Beardsley. Each of these texts “codifies a crucial tenet of New Critical formalist orthodoxy,” making them both very important to twentieth-century criticism.The Intentional Fallacy, according to Wimsatt, derives from “confusion between the poem and its origins” – essentially, it occurs when a critic puts too much emphasis on personal, biographical, or what he calls “external” information when analyzing a work. Wimsatt and Beardsley consider this strategy a fallacy partly because it is impossible to determine the intention of the author — indeed, authors themselves are often unable to determine the “intention” of a poem — and partly because a poem, as an act that takes place between a poet and an audience, has an existence outside of both and thus its meaning can not be evaluated simply based on the intentions of or the effect on either the writer or the audience. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, intentional criticism becomes subjective criticism, and so ceases to be criticism at all. For them, critical inquiries are resolved through evidence in and of the text — not “by consulting the oracle”.
Affective fallacy
The Affective fallacy refers to “confusion between the poem and its results”. It refers to the error of placing too much emphasis on the effect that a poem has on its audience when analyzing it.Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the effect of poetic language alone is an unreliable way to analyze poetry because, they contend, words have no effect in and of themselves, independent of their meaning. It is impossible, then, for a poem to be “pure emotion”, which means that a poem’s meaning is not “equivalent to its effects, especially its emotional impact, on the reader”.
As with the Intentional fallacy, engaging in affective criticism is too subjective an exercise to really warrant the label “criticism” at all — thus, for Wimsatt and Beardsley, it is a fallacy of analysis.
Concrete Universal
In “The Concrete Universal,” Wimsatt attempts to determine how specific or general a verbal representation must be in order to achieve a particular effect. What is the difference, for example, between referring to a “purple cow” and a “tan cow with a broken horn” ? In addressing such questions, Wimsatt attempts to resolve what it is that makes poetry different from other forms of communication, concluding that “what distinguishes poetry from scientific or logical discourse is a degree of concreteness which does not contribute anything to the argument but is somehow enjoyable or valuable for its own sake.” For Wimsatt, poetry is “the vehicle of a metaphor which one boards heedless of where it runs, whether cross-town or downtown — just for the ride”.The Domain of Criticism
In “The Domain of Criticism,” Wimsatt “ the domain of poetry and poetics from the encircling arm of the general aesthetician" – that is, he discusses the problems with discussing poetry in purely aesthetic terms. Wimsatt questions the ability of a poem to function aesthetically in the same way as a painting or sculpture. For one, visual modes such as sculpture or painting are undertaken using materials that directly correlate with the object they represent — at least in terms of their “beauty.” A beautiful painting of an apple, for example, is done with beautiful paint.Verbal expression, however, does not function this way — as Wimsatt points out, there is no such thing as a “beautiful” or “ugly” word. There is no correlation between words and their subject, at least in terms of aesthetics — “the example of the dunghill beautifully described is one of the oldest in literary discussion”.
More importantly, language does not function merely on the level of its effects on the senses, as visual modes do. A poem does not just derive its meaning from its rhyme and meter, but these are the domains of aesthetics — to analyse poetry on the basis of its aesthetics, then, is insufficient in one is to adequately explore its meaning.