The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Affective fallacy

Affective fallacy: A term coined by New Critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their essay “The Affective Fallacy” (1946) to refer to what they regarded as the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological responses of readers. Wimsatt and Beardsley described the affective fallacy as “a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). … It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism.” Reader-response critics, who study the way individual readers and interpretive communities go about making sense of texts, reject the concept of the affective fallacy.