Authorial Intention

Abstract

Arguments over authorial intention – and the relevance of this to the interpretation of a text – go back many centuries, having a notable force and currency in the discussion of religious texts. However, contemporary debates about authorial intention in the literary sphere can be quite precisely dated to the publication of a seminal article, entitled “The intentional fallacy,” by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, which first appeared in 1946 in the Sewanee Review . In that article, Wimsatt and Beardsley, who are generally associated with the school of literary criticism known as new criticism, argue that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a literary work of art” (1962[1946]: 92). Although they are, as the quotation reveals, primarily concerned with questions of value, this article served to initiate a discussion about the relationship between authorial intention and textual meaning that has continued, in different forms, to this day. The debates around intention touch on many of the most fundamental questions in literary criticism: the determinacy and determinability (or not) of textual meaning; the proper object of literary criticism; the author's authority (and the level of control he/she can wield over the meanings of his/her own work); the functions and methods of criticism; the resolution of interpretative disagreements; the role of the reader; and the nature of literary value. Such debates also, of course, spill over into the contiguous realms of art criticism and art history, aesthetics, philosophy, theology, film and theater studies, translation studies, and any discipline in which interpretation is key.