Intention and Interpretation, Now and Then

Abstract

Almost every interpretative university discipline in or adjacent to the Humanities makes routine, unproblematic appeal to intention as an interpretative move. By proscribing intentionalism as an instrument of interpretation, Literary Criticism is the outlier among adjacent and not so adjacent disciplines. The introduction to the special issue “Intention and Interpretation, Now and Then” maps the prime features of the intellectual landscape concerning intention and literary criticism in Anglo-American and French traditions since the late eighteenth century. It then highlights the losses that Literary Criticism incurs by its repudiation of intention as a heuristic tool. Apart from its loss of intellectual esteem by peers, any interpretive practice that refuses to intuit intention also loses significant cognitive and ethical purchase. The nature and magnitude of these losses can be measured in many ways. Articles in this special issue measure these losses by looking to the later medieval period in particular (with contributions also from the early medieval and early modern periods), when intention rose dramatically as a heuristic tool in many discursive fields, notably in criminal law, penitential ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. The contributions also explicate the way a premodern or early modern discourse deploys and sometimes defines intentionalism.