randomly today I decided to look up the definition of poetry and this is what I came up with...

"Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define."

So if poetry is meant to evoke an emotional response and it is expressed through meaning, how can the affective fallacy be true? It seems to undermine poetry's very definition.

Last Post Continued...

An interesting point brought up in the New York Times article had to do with the intentional fallacy. While some of us tend to see it in a bad light today, many scholars of the 1950s saw it as a "license to interpret." Seeing it in the light makes it much more friendly sounding to me. I had a view of the intentional fallacy of robbing the poem and poet of something. I saw the author as an important part of the poetic puzzle. But isn't it true that removing the author altogether gives so much more room for interpretation? If an author comes right out and says what his poem means in no uncertain terms then there is little to no room to interpret anything. However, this made me wonder where the line between the affective fallacy and interpretation is drawn. If the reader's response to the poem is not supposed to matter then why does his interpretation matter at all? I feel like in this instance, the intentional and affective fallacies have backed themselves into a corner. Getting rid of the author allows the reader more freedom, but the reader shouldn't matter either. So then, what does actually matter.

I keep getting a visual of a poem in the page of a book untouched by human hands. Simply sitting there, meaningless, but just "being." What good is a poem in an unopened book. Humanity is what makes poetry worthwhile. Be it the author or the reader. Without human minds the poem is simply a lot of words and a waste of space.

I don't know why this is so hard for me to simply accept. I just think that there must be meaning, or poetry is pointless. It almost seems like we are proving the arguments the ppl make against English majors. "Why do you study poetry? It's so boring. And what does all the fancy language mean anyway?" I can't imagine answering these questions with "oh well, the reader doesn't matter and neither does the author. it's all about the poem itself. " Imagining this in my mind is hilarious, and this could be attributed to the fact that it is 1 am, but our field of study is obscure enough as is. This could only make matters worse.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2DF1731F93AA35755C0A960948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

After the discussion in our last class, I was left with more questions than answers regarding the intentional and affective fallacies. These questions had more to do with my own personal misunderstanding on the subject than anything else. So, because of this confusion I decided to look a little further into these two literary ideas set forth by Wimsatt and Beardsley.

I found an interesting article in The New York Times entitled "The Critics Notebook: The Four Deadly Fallacies, Pathetic and Otherwise." (See Link) To my surprise and delight (please note heavy sarcasm here, simply because it was just another thing to possibly confuse me) there are two other fallacies that I had yet to wrap my mind around. The first, is the "Pathetic Fallacy" and while it may sound self-explanatory it most definitely is not. From the information I gleaned in the article, I understand the Pathetic fallacy to be a term coined by Joh n Ruskin. It is a phrase that he coined "for the tendency of writers unconvincingly to attribute sympathetic human qualities to inanimate forces in nature.'' The example provided in the article was the description of water as 'cruel' or 'kind' depending upon the mood of the character. The toehr fallacy that was introduced in this article was that of "the fallacy of imitative form." According to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the author of the article, 30 years ago these four fallacies were weapons wielded by english majors everywhere.

To be continued...