Editing Art (section)

===New Criticism and the "intentional fallacy"===
Following Duchamp during the first half of the 20th century, a significant shift to general aesthetic theory took place which attempted to apply aesthetic theory between various forms of art, including the literary arts and the visual arts, to each other. This resulted in the rise of the [[New Criticism]] school and debate concerning ''the intentional fallacy''. At issue was the question of whether the aesthetic intentions of the artist in creating the work of art, whatever its specific form, should be associated with the criticism and evaluation of the final product of the work of art, or, if the work of art should be evaluated on its own merits independent of the intentions of the artist.<ref name="Waugh2006">{{cite book|author=Patricia Waugh|author-link=Patricia Waugh|title=Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7LXMA_7Ko9YC|year=2006|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-929133-5|page=171|access-date=28 May 2018|archive-date=5 August 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190805225427/https://books.google.com/books?id=7LXMA_7Ko9YC|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Colebrook1997">{{cite book|author=Claire Colebrook|author-link=Claire Colebrook|title=New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aT-8AAAAIAAJ|year=1997|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-0-7190-4987-3|page=221|access-date=28 May 2018|archive-date=5 August 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190805225427/https://books.google.com/books?id=aT-8AAAAIAAJ|url-status=live}}</ref>

In 1946, [[William K. Wimsatt]] and [[Monroe Beardsley]] published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "[[Intentional Fallacy|The Intentional Fallacy]]", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an [[Authorial intentionality|author's intention]], or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.<ref name="Roholt2013">{{cite book|author=Tiger C. Roholt|title=Key Terms in Philosophy of Art|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=US6aAAAAQBAJ|year=2013|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1-4411-3246-8|page=161|access-date=28 May 2018|archive-date=5 August 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190805225427/https://books.google.com/books?id=US6aAAAAQBAJ|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Hick2017">{{cite book|author=Darren Hudson Hick|title=Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L_S4DgAAQBAJ|year=2017|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1-350-00691-1|access-date=28 May 2018|archive-date=5 August 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190805225426/https://books.google.com/books?id=L_S4DgAAQBAJ|url-status=live}}</ref>

In another essay, "[[Affective fallacy|The Affective Fallacy]]", which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the [[reader-response]] school of literary theory. Ironically, one of the leading theorists from this school, [[Stanley Fish]], was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his 1970 essay "Literature in the Reader".<ref>Leitch, Vincent B., et al., eds. ''The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Fish|first=Stanley|date=Autumn 1970|title=Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics|jstor=468593|journal=New Literary History|volume=2|issue=1|pages=123–162|doi=10.2307/468593}}</ref>

As summarized by [[Berys Gaut]] and Paisley Livingston in their essay "The Creation of Art": "Structuralist and post-structuralists theorists and critics were sharply critical of many aspects of New Criticism, beginning with the emphasis on aesthetic appreciation and the so-called autonomy of art, but they reiterated the attack on biographical criticisms' assumption that the artist's activities and experience were a privileged critical topic."<ref>Gaut and Livingston, ''The Creation of Art'', p. 3.</ref> These authors contend that: "Anti-intentionalists, such as formalists, hold that the intentions involved in the making of art are irrelevant or peripheral to correctly interpreting art. So details of the act of creating a work, though possibly of interest in themselves, have no bearing on the correct interpretation of the work."<ref name="Gaut and Livingston, p.6">Gaut and Livingston, p. 6.</ref>

Gaut and Livingston define the intentionalists as distinct from formalists stating that: "Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works." They quote [[Richard Wollheim]] as stating that, "The task of criticism is the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself."<ref name="Gaut and Livingston, p.6"/>