They do not want to ask, “What was the author trying to do?” and then “Was he or she successful in accomplishing this intention?” Even if they could ask the author, as they could in the case of T.S. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue 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” (468). These are what Wimsatt and Beardsley called “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.” My complaint about these phrases is more about the rhetorical effect of the word “fallacy” than the concepts themselves. Two other concepts remain as well, concepts I consider pernicious. However, the practice of close reading continues and has even been officially revived in the Common Core. New Criticism dominated English departments from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, so my professors were already having some questions about it. Their method was a close reading of the text, looking at the topic and theme of the work and such formal elements as ambiguity, irony, metaphor, symbolism, imagery and other devices. The practitioners of New Criticism called it “objective criticism” because they wanted to exclude factors that were either unknowable or subjective. New Criticism was focused on the text of the literary work itself to the exclusion of historical context, authorial biography, authorial intention, or any kind of reader response.
in the 1970’s, most of the faculty in the English Department had been trained as New Critics. When I was an undergraduate English Major at Cal State L.A.
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