Affective means that which is pertaining
to emotional effects or dispositions (known in psychology as 'affects').
Affective criticism or affectivism evaluates literary works in terms of the
feelings they arouse in audiences or readers . It was
condemned in an important essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (in
The Verbal Icon, 1954) as the affective fallacy, since in the view of these
New Critics such affective evaluation confused the literary work's objective
qualities with its subjective results