Pathetic Fallacy - is this a "thing"

[marmia1234]

My sons English report came home ( disclaimers: not in UK and I have a degree in English Literature)
In one section of the test they had to match a quote to its corresponding technique. For example - simile, imagery, metaphor, personification etc. One of those techniques was "pathetic fallacy" . I am flummoxed. Is this a normal thing I just missed somehow? Once he had a stab at which one was the "pathetic fallacy he was stuffed and only got 4 right out of 7 as was a bit discombobulated. Is this a common term in the UK or US
I have googled and it appears to be a version of personification.
Why is it pathetic?
Trying to add poll but seem to be unable.
YABU - everybody knows the term "Pathetic fallacy"
YANBU - WTF nobody has heard of that

I learned this 15 odd years ago. It's not a new thing.

Careful there, you’ll start a whole new debate about sarcasm vs irony 😄

Once again:

But an English Literature teacher or lecturer should be familiar with the term, surely?

Oh don't start another squabble, I don't have the energy! 😂

Anyway, Google agrees with me! https://www.google.com/search?q=irony+in+the+first+sentence+of+pride+and+prejudice&oq=irony+first+line+of+pride&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgBEAAYFhgeMgYIABBFGDkyCAgBEAAYFhgeMggIAhAAGBYYHjIQCAMQABiGAxiLAxiABBiKBTIQCAQQABiGAxiLAxiABBiKBTIQCAUQABiGAxiLAxiABBiKBTINCAYQABiLAxiABBiiBDIHCAcQIRiPAtIBCDkzMDZqMWo3qAIUsAIB&client=ms-android-xiaomi-rev1&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#sbfbu=1&pi=irony%20in%20the%20first%20sentence%20of%20pride%20and%20prejudice

One that didn’t feel the need to use Ruskin’s term to be able to explore EB’s use of personification.

The point is, knowing the term now has exactly zero effect on my understanding or appreciation of EB’s work. It’s art, not technology.

That doesn't actually make sense as an answer to my question, you realise?

I did mention in my OP that I'm not in the UK

Yes but omitted to say where you are.

It's quite clear from OP's 2nd and 3rd posts that she's in Australia.

🤦🏻‍♀️ The definition of pathetic fallacy is to ascribe human emotions to the natural environment, usually to reflect a character’s emotions. I’m aware that at this stage that writing this definition on this thread is the literary equivalent of the ‘cancel the cheque’ thread, because no one is reading the definition, but I’m persevering.

Oh for goodness sake. It is actually an answer to your question:

What kind of teacher/lecturer would teach Wuthering Heights without referencing pathetic fallacy?!

But you’re probably right. My teacher was rubbish and you are amazingly erudite.

I remember it from school. In fact I have a bizarrely specific memory of it from studying Jane Eyre in third year of secondary school, probably because I found it such a strange expression.

Hasn't come up much since!

As I said in my post, I was commenting on the use of the term fallacy, not on the use of the term pathetic. And I was being a bit frivolous about Ruskin. I expect he had some reason or other for regarding it as fallacious, but it is superficially puzzling:
The 'pathetic fallacy' is clearly fallacious in many scientific contexts (notably in misunderstandings of evolutionary theory) but I'm not sure how it can ever be 'fallacious' to use a literary or artistic conceit, since a fallacy is a failure of logic, and neither literature nor art seeks to apply logic correctly or derive valid conclusions
Based on near total ignorance of John Ruskin, I've never really trusted him not to be excessively harsh and judgemental. It's because I used to live near a lane that he bullied his students into building. I'm sure they would have been better off writing bad poetry or painting bad paintings . Reminds me of Wittgenstein who bullied a perfectly decent philosophy student into doing aircraft manufacture instead

The word 'fallacy' has shifted its meaning a few times, and for many centuries could just mean 'falsehood' alongside its meaning in logic! A lot of words now firmly embedded in English are relatively modern (e.g. "scientist" is Victorian). But yes, Ruskin was very odd in many ways.

Yeah, I noticed in the wikipedia entry that the poster above quoted from that the logical sense is claimed to be more common now than it was then. However, I think that the idea of trickery/deception via artifice seems to have been wedded to the term even in Victorian times (and in its Latin origin). Perhaps it was that element of artifice Ruskin disliked, rather than simply falsehood. But that seems a tad unfair on art. All art is artifice in some sense, isn't it?. Even the avoidance of artifice is a technique.

Anyway, yes, odd. As well as the road building there was the strange intolerance of women's pubic hair.

Thanks all for teaching me that is pathetic fallacy and not prophetic fallacy as i always believed. May I suggest my version is better and makes more sense?

I feel like I learned this phrase pre-A level English, maybe at GCSE level.
I'm not sure how someone can get an English degree without having come across it, apart from if the teachers were rubbish. But even then, if you read literary commentary/York Notes etc, it's very mainstream and widespread.

Have you stumbled across a “fronted adverbial” yet? Most English teachers were confused by that when Gove forced it into the syllabus.

The National Curriculum was first introduced in 1989, so I was just too old for it. (GCSEs in 1988, their first year.)

I never knew of fronted adverbials, but I do remember learning about subordinate clauses in what is now Y6. Most of my grammatical knowledge is from learning foreign languages, but we did cover things like nouns are naming words, verbs are doing words, subject/object/indirect object - probably in the year before subordinate clauses. And they were meant to be the no-grammar-teaching years of the early '80s.

English teacher here.

It is a thing and a fairly common term in Literature and Language at GCSE and above. It is "pathetic" because it relates to pathos (emotion) and a "fallacy" because it ascribes emotion to something that cannot literally have them.

The classic example is to use the weather to reflect the mood of the text or the characters. It does sort of.overlap with personifocation if you described the storm clouds as "angry" or a tree as standing guard "bravely" at the entramce of a house.

I love a fronted adverbial! Self professed grammer nerd though

Agreed.

Typo?

I learned about it in the Seventies, when studying "King Lear" for A Level English.

I’ve heard the term, but have no idea what it means

There's nothing wrong with my English Degree! I just hadn't heard that term, even though we did address the technique of weather and landscape reflecting inner turmoil or emotion. We just didn't say "pathetic fallacy". Stop dissing my degree everyone!

My teachers were not rubbish and the professors who taught me are renowned in their field.