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 in the Meaning of Poetry (1954); Hateful Contraries (1965) and Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957, with Cleanth Brooks). Wimsatt was considered crucial to New Criticism (particularly New Formalist Criticism; 1372). He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Influences
Wimsatt was influenced by Monroe Beardsley, with whom he wrote some of his most important pieces. Wimsatt also drew on the work of both ancient critics, such as Longinus and Aristotle, and some of his own contemporaries, such as T. S. Eliot and the writers of the Chicago School, to formulate his theories, often by highlighting key ideas in those authors' works in order to refute them.
Influence
Wimsatt's ideas have affected the development of reader-response criticism, and his influence has been noted in the works of writers such as Stanley Fish, and in works such as Walter Benn Michaels' and Steven Knapp’s “Against Theory” (Leitch et al. 1373-1374).
Approach
Wimsatt was interviewed, along with Walter J. Ong of Saint Louis University, by Sheila Hough in 1964. (Professor Wimsatt had received an honorary doctorate from Saint Louis University in 1963.) Hough asked Professor Wimsatt a question that still resonates today: "Is literature taught in complete isolation from its author, Mr. Wimsatt -- don't you consider the person who wrote it?"
Wimsatt replied: "I do, of course. Your question, I think, was prompted by that very fine essay of Father Ong's, 'The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,' which you read in his book The Barbarian Within [1962: 15-25]. It first appeared in Essays in Criticism at Oxford some years ago [1954], and was in part, I believe, an answer to an essay written many years ago, about twenty at least, by a friend of mine, Monroe Beardsley, and myself, called 'The Intentional Fallacy.' I would like to pay Father Ong the compliment of saying that I think that his essay 'The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn' is the only sensible response that has ever been written to that essay of ours."
As a staunch formalist critic, Wimsatt believed in the authority of the poem: any analysis of a poem must centre on the text itself (Leitch et al. 1371-1372). He outlines and advocates (particularly in his two influential essays written with Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy”) an “objective criticism” in which the critic essentially disregards the intentions of the poet and the effect of the poem on the audience as the sole (or even the major) factors in analyzing and evaluating a poem (Davis and Schleifer 43).
Wimsatt does allow for a certain degree of variation in the analysis of poetry and does not necessarily contend that there is only one possible reading for any given poem. He allows, for example, for what he calls the “literary sense” of meaning, saying that “no two different words or different phrases ever mean fully the same” (Verbal Icon xii).
Much of his theory, however, appears to stem from an ambivalence towards "impressionism, subjectivism, and relativism” (Leitch et al. 1373) in criticism. In Hateful Contraries, Wimsatt refers to a “New Amateurism,” an “anti-criticism” emerging in works such as Leslie Fiedler’s “Credo,” which appeared in the Kenyon Review. “The only reservation the theorist need have about such critical impressionism or expressionism,” says Wimsatt, “is that, after all, it does not carry on very far in our cogitation about the nature and value of literature…it is not a very mature form of cognitive discourse” (Hateful Contraries xvi).