the affective fallacy wimsatt and beardsley pdf free

Furthermore some observers might argue that the aesthetic, far from being relegated to the sidelines, has in fact made a comeback no less noteworthy than that of form. 4 Many critics use the two terms interchangeably, a conflation that makes the schism I am seeking to identify difficult to discern. Kant, of course, was not the only one to link form and aesthetics the two have generally remained yoked together within the history of Anglo-American criticism, including much of the New Formalist work that has emerged in the past two decades. According to Kant, the composition of a beautiful object represents a mere 'form of purposiveness' or a 'purposiveness without a purpose,' in that it serves no direct practical use it simply keeps the subject in a state of attention, producing a 'quickening of his cognitive powers' 'without any further aim,' allowing us to ' linger in our contemplation of the beautiful.' 3 Form's value, in other words, derives from the aesthetic pleasure it yields. 2 But if form demands the operation of aesthetic judgment, giving the latter a task to perform, then aesthetic judgment is also the response that grants form its particular value. the shape or play, the design or composition, of an object's various elements. What distinguishes aesthetic judgment from the mere appreciation of agreeable sensations is its attention to form, i.e. Immanuel Kant, after all, imagined a symbiotic relationship between the two. That aesthetic and formalist criticism could ever find themselves at odds might seem surprising, a sign even of theoretical confusion.

While formalism has returned to being a wholly respectable critical posture, aestheticism has not. 1 Curiously enough, however, this rekindled passion for form has not in every case meant a renewal of enthusiasm for that mode of response often thought to go hand-in-hand with form, namely aesthetic appreciation. If formalist analysis is the one thing literary scholars can assert as their own peculiar skill by virtue of years spent close reading poems and novels, forms also happen to be everywhere one looks. For many scholars, attention to form has miraculously become a means of both re-establishing the discipline's specificity and of expanding the range of contexts upon which it might claim interpretive purchase. This time around it claims greater power than ever before. Enjoying a second act that seemed all but inconceivable a couple decades ago, form has recently reclaimed center stage in academic literary studies.

The affective fallacy wimsatt and beardsley pdf free