Intentional fallacy

Intentional fallacy [ in-ten-shuh-nl fal-uh-see ]

1.     Definition: intentional fallacy is defined by Britannica as a "term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it. Introduced by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley in The Verbal Icon (1954), the approach was a reaction to the popular belief that to know what the author intended—what he had in mind at the time of writing—was to know the correct interpretation of the work. Although a seductive topic for conjecture and frequently a valid appraisal of a work of art, the intentional fallacy forces the literary critic to assume the role of cultural historian or that of a psychologist who must define the growth of a particular artist’s vision in terms of his mental and physical state at the time of his creative act." (“Britannica”)

2.     Examples: An example of intentional fallacy is the view that the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a mirroring of the writer's personal life with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald.

Another example of intentional fallacy is viewing the novel 1984 by George Orwell as a direct criticism of a dictatorship and Soviet communism.

An additional example of intentional fallacy can be found in Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism where the author interprets the poem The Waste Land by T.S.Elliot as "T.S. Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the first world war and from Eliot’s personal travails. " (Lewis 129)

3.      Sources:

 Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "intentional fallacy". Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 Oct. 2016, https://www.britannica.com/art/intentional-fallacy. Accessed 21 October 2023.

 Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Dominik Pazdera