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Intentionalism as metacriticism : a reassessment of the intentional fallacy

In 1946, Monroe C. Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt published an article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” which objected to the critical practice of treating claims about an artist as claims about her work. Thus was inaugurated what today is known as the intentionalism debate. I begin by offering a certain conception of the debate—not quite a novel conception, for it corresponds more or less to what Beardsley and Wimsatt took themselves to be doing, but one which, in recent decades, has increasingly been supplanted by something very different. I argue for the priority of this original conception, which is concerned primarily with the language and norms of criticism, over the more recent conceptions which focus on analyses of meaning. I then propose a view which defends the artist’s relevance against the objections of Beardsley and Wimsatt, so understood. The interest of my view lies in its circumvention of what many have (incorrectly) thought essential to the position to which Beardsley and Wimsatt were objecting.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:714930
Date January 2016
CreatorsGrewal, Siddhant
PublisherUniversity of Warwick
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/88752/

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