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.[1] Opponents, who undermined its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.[2]
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".[3] 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 life are secondary. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that even details about the work's composition or the author's intended meaning and purpose that might be found in other documents such as journals or letters are "private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact" and are thus secondary to the trained reader's rigorous engagement with the text itself.[3]
Wimsatt and Beardsley divide the evidence used in making interpretations of poetry (although their analysis can be applied equally well to any type of art)[citation needed] into three categories:
Internal (or public) evidence
Internal evidence refers to what is presented within a given work. This internal evidence includes strong familiarity with the conventions of language and literature: it "is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture". Analyzing a work of art based on internal evidence will not result in the intentional fallacy.
External (or private) evidence
What is not literally contained in the work itself is external to that work, including all private or public statements that the artist has made about the work of art, whether in conversations, letters, journals, or other sources. Evidence of this type is directly concerned with what the artist may have intended to do even or especially when it is not apparent from the work itself. Analyzing a work of art based on external evidence will likely result in the intentional fallacy.
Intermediate evidence
The third type of evidence, intermediate evidence, includes "private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member." Also included are "the history of words" and "the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had for him." Wimsatt and Beardsley argue for the use of intermediate evidence rather than external evidence in the interpretation of a literary work, but they recognize that these two types of evidence "shade into one another so subtly that it is not always easy to draw a line between" the two.
Thus, a text's internal evidence—the words themselves and their meanings—is open for literary analysis. External evidence—anything not contained within the text itself, such as statements made by the poet about the poem that is being interpreted—does not belong to literary criticism. Preoccupation with the authorial intent "leads away from the poem." According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, a poem does not belong to its author but rather "is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public."
In psychoanalytic criticism, the author's biography and unconscious state were seen as part of the text, and therefore the author's intent could be revived from a literary text—although the intent might be an unconscious one. There are critics who maintain that this unconscious characteristic reinforces the idea that the text is autonomous due to its profound ambiguity as well as the unresolved contradictions.[4] These supposedly underscore two implications: 1. the reader is forced to invent his own interpretation; 2. the author himself is not in conscious control.[4] Critics who do not subscribe to the psychoanalytic approach to authorial intent include Leo Strauss, who argued that the answer to the question of intent can only be obtained from the literary text itself.[5]
The Cambridge School of contextualist hermeneutics, a position most elaborated by Quentin Skinner, in the first instances distinguishes linguistic meaning from speech-acts: that is to say, things which the performance of an utterance does. Consider the following. Typically, the ceremony of marriage concludes upon the exchange of the utterance "I do". In such a case, to utter "I do" is not merely to report an internal disposition, but to perform an action, namely, to get married. The intended force of "I do" in such a circumstance is only ever retrievable through understanding something about the complex social activity of marriage. Indeed, to understand a speech-act is to understand what conventions are regulating its significance. Since actions are always publicly legible—they are done by the speech itself—this presupposes no knowledge about the author's mental states. The task is always thus: with as much contextual information as possible, can we establish which conventions a text was interacting with, and by inference to the best explanation, what the author's intent was?
In post-structuralism, there are a variety of approaches to authorial intent. For some of the theorists deriving from Jacques Lacan, and in particular theories variously called écriture féminine, gender and sex predetermine the ways that texts will emerge, and the language of textuality itself will present an argument that is potentially counter to the author's conscious intent. There is also the case of E.D. Hirsch, who maintained the importance of the connection between meaning and authorial intent. In this theory, he opposed the position of structuralists who maintained that language itself conveys meaning that is independent of human agency.[6]
For Marxist literary theorists, the author's intent is always a code for a particular set of ideologies in the author's own day. For Marxists (especially those of the Soviet realism type), authorial intent is manifest in the text and must be placed in a context of liberation and the materialist dialectic. However, Marxist-derived theorists have seen authorial intent in a much more nuanced way. Raymond Williams, for example, posits literary productions always exist within a context of emerging, resistant, and synthetic ideological positions. The author's intent is recoverable from the text, but there are always encoded within it several separate positions. The author might be arguing consciously for empire, but hidden within that argument will be a response to a counterargument and a presentation of an emerging synthesis. Some members of the reception theory group (Hans Robert Jauss, in particular) have approximated the Marxist view by arguing that the forces of cultural reception reveal the ideological positions of both author and readership.
Reader response critics denies the stability and accessibility of meaning as well as the ideological approaches to literary texts that forces lenses for understanding them.[7] These critics view the authorial intent variously. In general, they have argued that the author's intent itself is immaterial and cannot be fully recovered. However, the author's intent will shape the text and limit the possible interpretations of a work. The reader's impression of the author's intent is a working force in interpretation, but the author's actual intent is not. Some critics in this school believe that reader response is a transaction and that there is some form of negotiation going on between authorial intent and reader’s response. According to Michael Smith and Peter Rabinowitz, this approach is not simply about the question “What does this mean to me?” because if that was the case, the power of the text to transform is given up.[8]
Weak intentionalism
Weak intentionalism combines intentionalism with insights from reader response. Mark Bevir in The Logic of the History of Ideas sees meanings as necessarily intentional but suggests that the relevant intentions can be those of readers as well as those of authors. Weak intentionalists privilege intentionality to emphasize that texts do not have meanings in themselves. They believe that meanings are always meanings for people—albeit the relevant people, whether authors or readers.
Extreme Intentionalism
In her book Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (2017), Kathleen Stock argues for an "extreme" focus on authorial intent in fictional texts. She proposes that an author's text has a certain fictional content if and only if the author intends that the reader imagines the fictional content. The reader has to recognize the intention and use it in the imagining process.[9]
In textual criticism
Authorial intention is of great practical concern to some textual critics. These are known as intentionalists and are identified with the Bowers-Tanselle school of thought.[10] Their editions have as one of their most important goals the recovery of the author's intentions (generally final intentions). When preparing a work for the press, an editor working along the principles outlined by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle will attempt to construct a text that is close to the author's final intentions. For transcription and typesetting, authorial intentionality can be considered paramount.
An intentionalist editor would constantly investigate the documents for traces of authorial intention. On one hand, it can be argued that the author always intends whatever the author writes and that at different points in time the same author might have very different intentions. On the other hand, an author may in some cases write something he or she did not intend. For example, an intentionalist would consider for emendation the following cases:
The authorial manuscript misspells a word: an error in intention, it is usually assumed. Editorial procedures for works available in no 'authorized editions' (and even those are not always exempt) often specify correcting such errors.
The authorial manuscript presents what appears to be a misformat of the text: a sentence has been left in run-on form. It is assumed that the author might have regretted not beginning a new paragraph, but did not see this problem until afterwards, until rereading.
The authorial manuscript presents a factual error.
In cases such as these where the author is living, they would be questioned by the editor who would then adhere to the intention expressed. In cases where the author is deceased, an intentionalist would attempt to approach authorial intention. The strongest voices countering an emphasis on authorial intent in scholarly editing have been D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, proponents of a model that accounts for the "social text," tracing material transformations and embodiments of works while not privileging one version over another.
↑ A. Huddleston, "The Conversation Argument for Actual Intentionalism", British Journal of Aesthetics52(3):241–256 (2012).
↑ Sutcliffe, Peter (2013). Is There an Author in this Text? Discovering the Otherness of the Text. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers. p.9. ISBN9781620328231.
1 2 Giddens, Anthony; Turner, Jonathan (1987). Social Theory Today. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p.49. ISBN0-8047-1397-9.
↑ Xenos, Nicholas (2008). Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp.71–72. ISBN978-0-415-95089-3.
↑ Selden, Raman (1995). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 8, From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.279. ISBN0-521-30013-4.
↑ Mtata, Kenneth; Koester, Craig (2016). To All the Nations: Lutheran Hermeneutics and the Gospel of Matthew. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. p.40. ISBN978-3-374-04375-0.
↑ Appleman, Deborah (2015). Critical Encounters in Secondary English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, Third Edition. Teachers College Press. p.32. ISBN978-0-8077-7355-0.
Dowling, William C. "The Gender Fallacy", in Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Ed. Daphne Patai and Will Corral. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Burke, Seán (2010). The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (3ed.). Edinburgh University Press. ISBN978-0748637119.
Talamo, Roberto (2013). Intenzione e iniziativa (1ed.). Progedit. ISBN978-8861941878.
Stock, Kathleen (2017). Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (1ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0198849766.
Art is a diverse range of human activity and its resulting product that involves creative or imaginative talent generally expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste; and functions as the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgements of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".
Deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Originalism is a method of constitutional and statutory interpretation. Originalists assert that legal text should be interpreted based on the original understanding at the time of adoption. Originalists object to the idea of the significant legal evolution being driven by judges in a common law framework and instead favor modifications of laws through the Legislature or through Constitutional amendment.
In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, via close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures.
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader 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 form of the work.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Monroe Curtis Beardsley was an American philosopher of art.
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. 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 question the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.
"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
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.
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