John Farrell, The Varieties of Authorial Intentions: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Frederik Kiparski

doi:10.21825/aj.v8i1.11489

Abstract

John Farrell, The Varieties of Authorial Intentions: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Highlights

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous article “The Intentional Fallacy” (1954), and later on Barthes’ (1967) and Foucault’s (1969) seminal discussions of literary authorship, marked an epistemic turn in literary studies
According to Farrell, “The Intentional Fallacy” and poststructuralism have engaged in a new dead end that he calls “the textual fallacy—the notion that a text is meaningful purely on its own” (9—emphasis original)
In order to find a way out of this proposed fallacy, Farrell refers to communication theories to explain why intention is a necessary concept of human action and communication and why it has to be part of literary interpretation

Summary

Introduction

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous article “The Intentional Fallacy” (1954), and later on Barthes’ (1967) and Foucault’s (1969) seminal discussions of literary authorship, marked an epistemic turn in literary studies. Farrell argues that approaching literary texts as utterances means to suppose that the work is “meant” (34—emphasis original) and that the author chooses their words in such a way that their anticipated readers may infer their intentions from the text: “Grasping the content of a literary work depends primarily upon our ability to interpret the linguistic structures of various kinds that compose the work itself in its peculiar context.

Results

Conclusion