William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr.
   HOME
*





William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr.
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. (November 17, 1907 – December 17, 1975) was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to discuss the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art. Life and career Wimsatt was born in Washington D.C., attended Georgetown University and, later, Yale University, where he received his PhD In 1939, Wimsatt joined the English department at Yale, where he taught until his death in 1975. During his lifetime, Wimsatt became known for his studies of eighteenth-century literature (Leitch et al. 1372). He wrote many works of literary theory and criticism such as ''The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson'' (1941) and ''Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the "Rambler" and "Dictionary" of Samuel Johnson'' (1948; Leitch et al. 1372). His major works include ''The Verbal Icon: Studies ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Reader-response Criticism
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), o ...") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and mode (literature), form of the work. Development Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in the US and Germany. This movement shifted the focus from the text to the reader and argues that affective response is a legitimate point for departure in criticism. Its conceptualization of critical practice is distinguished from the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the '' Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the S ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Genetic Fallacy
The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue) is a fallacy of irrelevance in which arguments or information are dismissed or validated based solely on their source of origin rather than their content. In other words, a claim is ignored or given credibility based on its source rather than the claim itself. The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit. The first criterion of a good argument is that the premises must have bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim in question. Genetic accounts of an issue may be true, and they may help illuminate the reasons why the issue has assumed its present form, but they are not conclusive in determining its merits. In ''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'' (1995) it is asserted that the term originated in Morris Raphael Cohen and Ernest Nagel's book ''Logic and Scientific Method'' (1934). However, in a book review published in ''The Nation'' in 1926, Mortimer J. Adler complained that ''The St ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Intentional Fallacy
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted. Opponents have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies. Varying attitudes towards intentionalism in literary theory New Criticism New Criticism, as espoused by Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, T. S. Eliot, and others, argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art". Revised and republished in The author, they argue, cannot be reconstructed from a writing—the text is the primary source of meaning, and any details of the author's desires or li ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Kenyon Review
''The Kenyon Review'' is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, US, home of Kenyon College. ''The Review'' was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. ''The Review'' has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin."History"
the ''Kenyon Review'' Website, Retrieved January 26, 2007
The magazine's short stories have won more

Leslie Fiedler
Leslie Aaron Fiedler (March 8, 1917 – January 29, 2003) was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work incorporates the application of psychological theories to American literature. Fiedler's best known work is the book ''Love and Death in the American Novel'' (1960). A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to ''Love and Death in the American Novel'' as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work." This work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous—now increasingly accepted—judgement that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death. Life Early years Fiedler was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents Lillian and Jacob Fiedl ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Subjectivism
Subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth. The success of this position is historically attributed to Descartes and his methodic doubt, although he used it as an epistemological tool to prove the opposite (an objective world of facts independent of one's own knowledge, ergo the "Father of Modern Philosophy" inasmuch as his views underlie a scientific worldview). Subjectivism accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law. In extreme forms like Solipsism, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it. One may consider the qualified empiricism of George Berkeley in this context, given his reliance on God as the prime mover of human perception. Metaphysical subjectivism Subjectivism is a label used to denote the philosophical tenet that ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, ''Impression, soleil levant'' (''Impression, Sunrise''), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a Satire, satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper ''Le Charivari''. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Affective Fallacy
Affective fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. The term was coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1949 as a principle of New Criticism which is often paired with their study of ''The Intentional Fallacy''. Concept The concept of affective fallacy is an answer to the idea of impressionistic criticism, which argues that the reader's response to a poem is the ultimate indication of its value. It is the antithesis of affective criticism, which is the practice of evaluating the effect that a literary work has on its reader or audience. The concept was presented after the authors had presented their paper on ''The Intentional Fallacy''. First defined in an article published in ''The Sewanee Review'' in 1946, the concept of an affective fallacy was most clearly articulated in ''The Verbal Icon'', Wimsatt's collection of essays published in 1954. Wimsatt u ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Saint Louis University
Saint Louis University (SLU) is a private Jesuit research university with campuses in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, and Madrid, Spain. Founded in 1818 by Louis William Valentine DuBourg, it is the oldest university west of the Mississippi River and the second-oldest Jesuit university in the United States. It is one of 27 member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. The university is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. In the 2021–2022 academic year, SLU had an enrollment of 12,883 students. The student body included 8,138 undergraduate students and 4,745 graduate students that represents all 50 states and 82 countries. The university is classified as a Research II university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. For more than 50 years, the university has maintained a campus in Madrid, Spain. The Madrid campus was the first freestanding campus operated by an Ameri ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Walter J
Walter may refer to: People * Walter (name), both a surname and a given name * Little Walter, American blues harmonica player Marion Walter Jacobs (1930–1968) * Gunther (wrestler), Austrian professional wrestler and trainer Walter Hahn (born 1987), who previously wrestled as "Walter" * Walter, standard author abbreviation for Thomas Walter (botanist) ( – 1789) Companies * American Chocolate, later called Walter, an American automobile manufactured from 1902 to 1906 * Walter Energy, a metallurgical coal producer for the global steel industry * Walter Aircraft Engines, Czech manufacturer of aero-engines Films and television * ''Walter'' (1982 film), a British television drama film * Walter Vetrivel, a 1993 Tamil crime drama film * ''Walter'' (2014 film), a British television crime drama * ''Walter'' (2015 film), an American comedy-drama film * ''Walter'' (2020 film), an Indian crime drama film * ''W*A*L*T*E*R'', a 1984 pilot for a spin-off of the TV series ''M*A*S*H'' * ''W ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]