Intentional fallacy

 Introduction:-

                The claim of author's intention upon critic's judgement has been challenged in a number of recent discussions. W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, in his essay "Intentional fallacy" raised the issue of it. The term used in 20th century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it. The Intentional fallacy was first published in 1946 and later published in The Verbal Icon in 1953.      

              

About the Critic:- 

            William Kurtz Wimsatt (1907-1975) and Monroe Curtis Beardsley (1915-1985) are best known for their co-authorship of "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy". Both the essays articulate what have come to be considered the fundamental tenets of the American New Criticism. In the first essay they describe the problem to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of artist, who created it. In the second one, they refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader.

General introduction of an essay:-

           "Intention" in literary work simply means "What he intended". In order to judge poet's performance we must know what he intended. Intention is design or plan in the author's mind or what made him write. Out of these, Wimsatt and Beardsley make strong arguments about the problem of author's intention. 

          A poem does not come into existence by an accident. As professor Stoll has remarked,

A poem comes out from a head, not out of a hat.

         Through the design or intention as a standard of poem, a critic should not judge the worth of the poet's performance. They argue that the problem with intention is that it requires private knowledge about the author. To know what the author intended, we have to learn contextual knowledge that exists outside of the work of art. This may be interesting for historians and definitely has its own value, but it is irrelevant when judging the work of art for itself. A poem can be only through it's meaning- since its medium is words - yet it is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.

A poem should not Mean but Be.

              Poetry succeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lump from pudding. In this sense, poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if we correctly infer the intention.

          "A work of art should be judged not the realisation of meaning", we moved away from this idea during the period of Romanticism, which believed the author was some genius who needed to be understood in order to appreciate the work of art. It created a fixation on the idea of the "author".

          In reality, they argued, a poem does not have an author, it has a speaker. The real success of the poem depends on how the speaker conveys meaning. It doesn't matter, if we don't get what the author meant to say as long as we get what the speaker is speaking. For example, alluding to something in another country that we have no knowledge of, doesn't mean we should learn about that thing in advance to understand the poem; The illusion in itself should have a "suggestive power" that allows us to understand its significance without searching for its private knowledge - meaning.

Main Arguments:-

            The main argument on which essay is formulated rests upon the clash between romantic and modernist concept of literature. Romantics define it as "vehicle of personal expression" and modernist define it as "pure linguistic art". Wimsatt and Beardsley started by arguing that intentional Fallacy is a romantic phenomenon as it depends on expressionist aspects of poetry. They quote a rhetorician and philosophical critic Cassius Longinus who defines,

Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.

            Also, Goethe, a German poet, playwright, novelist and critic, focused upon author's intention in order to perform"Constructive criticism" of text and sets three questions: "What did author set out to do?" "What his plan reasonable and sensible?" and "How far did he succeeded in carrying it out?".

           Similarly, Benedetto Croce stressed upon gazing work of art as author gazed it while producing it. i.e. stressed on "author's gaze" or "author's intention". In short, he focuses on looking the text with author's eye. 

        These pre-modernist beliefs were debased by new criticism intentionalists like Wimsatt, who saw work of art as a "Verbal Icon" that means the text speaks, it has its own soul and author is not required to give direction to the way of the reading the text. 

            T. S. Eliot, in "Tradition and Individual Talent" argued that  the truthful criticism and sensetive appreciation of text is directed upon poetry, not poet. Critic's like C. S. Lewis and Tillyard also carry forward the same formulation in "The Personal Heresy". Oscar Wilde in "Picture of Dorain Gray" revealed the aim of art i.e. "relevant art" and "conceal artist" hense bestowing due importance and value to the text or art.

Dramatic speaker vs Author:-

         Furthering this argument, they tried to build a distinction between dramatic speaker and the author. Anti intentionalists claim that if poem is expression of personal emotions, then that emotions should not be confused with author's emotions, because they are emotions of "Dramatic speaker". Beardsley affirmed that lyrical poems of Wordsworth are representational and not performing one. So one should focus on speaker and not in Wordsworth, because linguistic work has quality of being "self - sufficient linguistic entity" and poem is "Verbal Icon" which belongs to public domain and not to the poet.

Conclusion:-

            To conclude, after the publication of "The Intentional Fallacy", poetic analysis was given more importance than biographical criticism focusing on internal evident. Intentional fallacy, a literary term asserts that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is not the only, and perhaps not most important. The notion has become central to modern literary criticism and is an important part of what is known as the "New Criticism".

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