Intention in the Text

Abstract

This chapter begins by the author's use of the story ‘Poem is Whitman's. Is the Voice?’ in presenting the argument that who is speaking matters because intention is, or is not, a valid concern for textual criticism, dependent in part on whether there in an author, a voice, whose presence can be inferred from the text. The chapter further discusses that the term voice, even when used in grammatical terminology, is a metaphor inferring by analogy the intent of the subject from the structure of the predicate. It then presents the problem confronted by the textual and literary critic – the artefactual status of the object or ‘whatness’ – and makes a distinction between ‘motives’ and ‘intentions’. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the different views on intention in text espoused by various theorists, the criticisms and problems faced by each, and the argument that Edmund Husserl's definition of consciousness as a movement toward an ‘intentional object’ could provide valuable insight into the rationale and procedure for intentionalist editing.