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

Intentional fallacy

Intentional fallacy: A term coined by American New Critics William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) to refer to the practice of basing interpretations on the expressed or implied intentions of authors, a practice they judged to be erroneous. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” As formalists, they viewed literary works as objects in their own right and maintained that the critic’s task is to show what is actually in the text, not what an author intended to put there.