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...