Boards
Affective fallacy
does anyone know much about this?
i find it really fascianting and it's something i've always thought about before i realised that it had a name and was a proper critical concept.
like...the idea that sometimes subjective emotional response blurs the ability to critically asses a piece of art/literature/music/film...whatever....the dynamic between thinking something is objectively amazing without it inducing any strong emotional feeling and something provoking strong feelings in you but perhaps still not thinking it's a particularly great piece of work...
"The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism [ . . . which . . .] begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism [with the result that] the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear."
"The report of some readers . . . that a poem or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account."
"The critic is not a contributor to statistical countable reports about the poem, but a teacher or explicator of meanings. His readers, if they are alert, will not be content to take what he says as testimony, but will scrutinize it as teaching."
hmm...ISN'T THAT INTERESTING EVERYONE?