Intention and Ogden Nash

Abstract

One of the most vexed terms in literary criticism is "intention." William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley tried to minimize its role in our critical vocabulary by their essay "The Intentional Fallacy"; and for the New Critics, led by the example and precepts of Cleanth Brooks, intention was a forbidden topic. 1 But forbidding them seldom weakens the popularity of ideas any more than it does the popularity of human activities, and literary intention has enjoyed an active critical life since then. For some critics the author's intention can be equated with the meaning of a literary text, and so in their view recovering that intention becomes the primary goal of literary criticism. 2 Critics with a psychoanalytical bent have enlarged the territory of the term to incorporate unconscious intention, and social critics, including New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, have often attributed intention to a social entity, such as the power elite of a society, or even the society as a whole.