Weird Immanence: Genre and Belief in Blackwood's Fiction

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning

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.

In attempting to understand the degree to which a filmmaker controls the construction of narrative (Bordwell’s ‘intentionality’), we also need to ascertain which agent or agents are responsible for specific parts of a film: the director, the producer, the writer, the star, etc. A contrasting perspective can be seen in Janet Staiger’s (2003, p. 31) consideration of W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley’s ‘intentional fallacy’ where the emphasis on the meaning in the narrative is placed with the spectator. Gregory Currie (1995, pp. 245–249) forgoes his ‘Real Author Intentionalism’ for ‘Implied Author Intentionalism’ suggesting that how works are interpreted is more important than authorial intention. Torben Grodal (2004) considers the links between intentionality, consciousness and free will and the claim that these are superseded by ‘… language, culture, discourses, or unconscious traumas’ (p. 27). Arguing for the role of intentionality in the creative process he points out ‘Somehow, the fact that the function of consciousness and intentions are influenced by non-conscious factors has been interpreted as if consciousness has no role whatever’. Staiger (2000, pp. 37–39) constructs ‘perverse spectators’—her term for audiences that do not necessarily perceive or react as expected. Criticising the ‘normative description’ as a blanket definition for the nature of the audience, she lists seven instances of inaccuracies in the way audiences are defined. These range from their artificial construct at the hands of scholars to a lack of recognition in audience variety, erroneous assumptions about why audiences watch films and inaccuracy in the assumed knowledge of audiences.

A formal claim was made in the mid- 20th century that the goal of art conservation is to present the artwork as the artist intended it to be seen. Dispute over this claim among conservators and art historians involved differences of perspective on the relative roles of science and art history in the interpretation of artist's intent. A separate but concurrent debate among philosophers, art critics, and literary critics was sparked by publication of “The Intentional Fallacy,” a scholarly article discrediting appeals to the intentions of artists and authors in art and literary criticism. In this separate debate, difficulty in the evaluation and application of artist's intent was traced to ambiguity of the term “intent.” The author discusses 11 variations of its meaning and puts the issues surrounding artist's intent together in the contexts of art conservation. He also presents more recent viewpoints in the social sciences that associate issues of artist's intent with the role of the artist in the continued existence of the artwork. The writings of contemporary philosophers contribute useful perspectives on the essential nature of art and the autonomy of artworks from their creators. The author finds that the interpretation and application of artist's intent is an interdisciplinary task and that its evaluation in conservation contexts is limited to consideration of distinctive stylistic characteristics that demonstrate the correlated individuality of artists and their work.

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.

The idea that authorial intentions should be regarded with suspicion has been a literary-critical commonplace for decades. As long ago as 1919, T. S. Eliot seemed to warn against them when he argued that the very idea of a poet expressing their personality in a poem is built upon an excessively unified conception of a personality, and that what is important in poetry often has little to do with the lives of its authors. ‘Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation’, he concluded, ‘are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.’1 Associated ideas flourished in the heyday of New Criticism, with William Empson, in Seven Kinds of Ambiguity (1930), drawing attention to the range of meanings which texts can express and in doing so inspiring later critics to scrutinise meanings in texts beyond those intended by their authors. A more direct attack on authorial intention appeared in 1946 in William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s seminal essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, where they argued that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’.2 Judgement was to centre on the text, not the author.

Farrell traces the modernist beginnings of twentieth-century suspicion toward authorial intention, noting the contrast with the visual arts where artists’ intentions acquired new prominence. Literary critics, hoping to avoid the “intentional fallacy,” established one of their own—that the meaning of a work depends on the text alone. Among the trends contributing to this fallacy were the reaction against Romantic expressive psychology, the mid-century vogue of positivism, the religiously tinged traditionalism of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and the New Critics, and hopes for the arrival of a new, transindividual, anti-bourgeois culture that animated the poststructuralist prophecies of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault.

“The Intentional Fallacy” by Wimsatt and Beardsley is a beautifully carved masterpiece to formulate and analyze the conception of authorial intent in any literary or non-literary text. According to multiple perspective there are multiple argument related to presence and absence of authorial intent in understanding of any text. Amidst such turmoil Wimsatt and Beardsley tried to pacify this argument by citing various exemplars from Romantic and Modernist texts. In simple terms “authorial intentionalism” refers to analyzing the text according to author’s intent behind the text. TS Eliot, Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks belong to the school of New Criticism and they deny the use of authorial intent in understanding any text. They state that author’s intentions are “neither available, nor desirable” to judge a literary work.

Intended and Actual Meanings:The Case of Public Signs in the Composition Classroom Peter Kratzke In his well-circulated-on-YouTube "slam poem" titled "What Teachers Make," the experienced secondary teacher Taylor Mali emphasizes that he "make[s] them [students] show all their work in math / And hide it on their final drafts in English" (Mali). The moment breezes along in the poem's overall, wonderfully emotional content, but the question of purposeful process ("math") versus detached product ("English") gives pause, especially in terms of pedagogical discussions about reflective practice. Is it "all good" in writing classes when, for instance, we ask for an argumentative essay but get a beautifully written personal narrative with no documented source materials? Short answer: no, but the longer answer leads us straight to what former CEA President Dr. John Shawcross calls, in another context, the "thorny question of authorial intent . . ." (18). This question is crucial in the writing classroom to what Amy Devitt calls "genre awareness" (191 ff.), but good, quick examples of genre that show the formative role played by intentionality are hard to find—until, that is, we realize that good examples are all around us. To be sure, the issue of authorial intentionality is a kind of Forbidden Zone for literary analysis and appreciation, one that makes teachers wave copies of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy" as an invocation. I recall, in fact, how I myself was scolded by Dr. Shawcross for my facile agreement with Helen Gardner that, in Gardner's words, John Donne's "The Ecstasy" "smells a little of the lamp" (306). I argued, in other words, that Donne had intended to write one genre of poem but failed because he did not meet my generic expectations. Dr. Shawcross quickly disabused me of this idea: although we may infer an author's intention from rhetorical situation and biography, he said, we must be cautious in presuming too much based on such information. After all, "the proof of the pudding," as the proverb begins but then is rarely completed, "is in the eating." Most of the time, "the eating" attends to (often ideologically considered) matters of the text itself, the context of the text, or the reader's response. At the same time, a text must start somewhere, and in that point we have the continuum from intention (Point A) to text (Point B) to context (Point C) to reader (Point D), a continuum that may be usefully coupled in sets: writers have intentions, given which they produce texts; subsequently, contexts motivate how readers read. A great deal of scholarship in literary studies over the last decades has attended to the interplay between texts [End Page 66] and contexts (Points B and C); meanwhile, rhetorical approaches to genre have, effectively, brought matters back to the causal relationship between what writers intend in terms of how they want readers to respond (Points A and D). In a 1980 article for the College Composition and Communication about intentionality, C. H. Knoblauch brings the matter to the classroom: "writers' behaviors and what stimulates them are at least as valuable as generated texts. Indeed, in writing courses those behaviors are primary, since one concern is to reduce disparities between what writers set out to do and what their completed discourses actually achieve" (155). To illustrate such disparities, we have the case of public signs—and I do not mean "signs" in the way of semiotics but actual, physical signs. Examples include placards, billboards, road signs, banners, and so forth. Why signs? They at once are ubiquitous in our lives and instantiate a rhetorical approach to genre. Signs involve the emblematic interplay of numerals, icons, and words. Signs direct our physical lives. Signs define, direct, and delimit us. Without signs, chaos would come again. Yet, even while we need signs, we are annoyed by them and, in subtle ways, continually evaluate them. Consequently, we often feel a slight resistance to signs that is registered with an insistence on denotative precision. We are caught, in short, between what we know signs would have us understand (their intentions) and what we demand as their subservient readers. As the Canadian group Five Man...

Reviewed by: The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser by Mary K. Stillwell Scott Knickerbocker Mary K. Stillwell, The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013. 285 pp. $24.95. Mary K. Stillwell’s book about Ted Kooser blends biography and literary criticism, as the “Life and Poetry” of her title expresses. One of the risks of such a project is to commit what New Critics termed the “intentional fallacy,” that is, to interpret a poem through the lens of the poet’s personal life, beliefs, and intentions rather than through the poem’s form itself. The poem, according to this reasoning, exists as a thing unto itself and produces meaning independent of the poet’s intentions (this is why T. S. Eliot said that the poet was the last person who should be consulted as to the meaning of his or her poem). Poets have long known (since before the New Critical era) that art does indeed wield mysteriously autonomous power, and a poet (including Kooser) would be the first to admit that a poem often exceeds and even pushes back against his or her intentions. Language directs the author as much as the author directs language. That being said, poems do not exist in a vacuum; they grow out of a particular poet’s particular life. This is why a work such as Stillwell’s is so valuable; while her book is more biography than literary criticism, she carefully considers Kooser’s poetry in the context of his life events without falling into the intentional fallacy. Her approach requires finesse, so that instead of presenting Kooser’s poetry as merely autobiographical or confessional, Stillwell [End Page 308] builds up the biographical and historical context surrounding each of Kooser’s books of poetry and then offers close readings of some of the poems from each book. That way we experience Kooser’s life as the seedbed of his poetry, but we experience his poems as extending beyond his biography. In other words, his life is a place to start but never a place to end when it comes to appreciating the significance of individual poems. If Kooser’s readers want to better understand the poet behind the poetry, they will find in Stillwell a meticulous guide. She provides many details surrounding Kooser’s upbringing in Iowa, his education in Nebraska (including the significant influence of his mentor Karl Shapiro), his career in insurance, his family life, his bout with cancer, and his many recognitions, including the Pulitzer Prize and his term as poet laureate. Stillwell’s exhaustive research is never overwhelming; rather, she offers the details of Kooser’s biography most often in a way that bears directly on his poetic output. She also enriches our understanding of Kooser as a poet of Nebraska and the Midwest whose finely crafted poems draw our attention in plainspoken language to the history, small towns, and common people of the Great Plains. Working far outside the dominant literary establishment—both geographically and in terms of current fads—Kooser modestly yet powerfully turns us toward the mystery, heartache, and beauty at the heart of ordinary life. Stillwell’s excellent study helps us to understand how and why he does this. Scott Knickerbocker The College of Idaho Copyright © 2014 Western Literature Association

What is Paradise Lost about? According to Tillyard, ‘the question has by no means been settled’ [1930, 237], nor is it now. Not only the answers, but the very formulation of the question, depend upon fundamental issues of literary theory. One could say that the difference between Samuel’s answer and Kermode’s (see Introduction) involves how one reads the title. Samuel is emphasising ‘Paradise’ and happiness, Kermode underlining ‘Lost’ and hence deprivation and death. This is not merely a subjective judgement, but a question of literary ideology. Reacting particularly to Kermode, Dyson and Lovelock [1973, 238–9] describe the great divide in literary criticism: one either believes ‘that truth itself is relative’, or one does not. Broadly speaking, ‘liberal humanist’ critics assume that literature reflects or at least attempts to express certain verities about human life. Literary consequences of this view include a conviction that, with due attention and adequate information, we can discover the ‘essential meaning’ of a text, and that this corresponds to the author’s intention in writing it. Some classic assumptions were challenged before deconstruction affected criticism, as for instance by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their attack on ‘the intentional fallacy’ [1954].

Book Reviews 99 Carmichael has produced another stimulating volume on the shaping and purpose ofbiblical law. While every scholar may not agree with his conclusions, they are well worth our attention. This book should be a part of every collection on law and on the study of narrative analysis. Victor H. Matthews Department ofReligious Studies Southwest Missouri State University Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19, by Robert Ignatius Letellier. Biblical Interpretation Series 10. Leiden: E. 1. Brill, 1995. 296 pp. $128.00. Robert Letellier provides what is probably the most comprehensive study of Genesis 18-19 in the English language. Only the book-length study of Rudin-O'Brasky in Hebrew compares to the coverage offered by Letellier. Letellier divides his book into four chapters. The initial chapter concisely guides us through a Forschungsbericht of Pentateucha1criticism, with special emphasis upon the ferment since the mid-sixties. He documents the paradigm shift in biblical studies from diachronic to synchronic approaches. At the end of this chapter, he lays out his own methodological approach in which he opts for a combination of the "vertical" and "horizontal" methods, after the model ofFokkelman's "total interpretation." Letellier's hermeneutical approach attempts to steer a middle course between the deconstruction ofDerrida and the "intentional fallacy" of the older historical criticism. He locates his "North Star" in this enterprise in the assumption that the text possesses a certain transcendence (p. 29). Chapter two justifies his delimitation of these two chapters as a proper locus for study. The various criteria for determining the boundaries ofa self-contained unit within a larger narrative complex and the structural patterns inherent within the section receive extended discussion. He determines, by a close study of the structure, both surface and "deep," that there are five basic units within the two chapters as we now have them. One might quibble here and there with some of his analyses, but, on the whole, his observations are very illuminating. The five basic units, which are treated as scenes, are as follows: 1. 18: 1-15: the visit of YHWH to Abraham at Mamre 2. 18:16-33: YHWH's soliloquy and dialogue with Abraham 3. 19:1-23: the visit of the messengers to Lot at Sodom 4. 19:24-29: the destruction of Sodom and its aftermath 100 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, NO.2 5. 19:30-38: the story of Lot and his daughters in the cave These basic units are further subdivided into discrete movements each of which assists in unfolding the scene. Having done this, he is ready to turn to the actual task of analyzing how the text "works." Chapter three, covering about 124 pages, is the longest and most thorough section of the book. Letellier analyzes each unit or scene from three different vantage points: the literary structure, the language as a conveyor of the story, and significant details within the basic unit. By far the most lengthy treatment occurs in the linguistic analysis section. Lexical, grammatical, syntactic, thematic, and socio-cultural analyses are patiently deployed in order to eludicate the text. Letellier is clearly at home in Classical Hebrew as well as the broader field of (the new) literary criticism. Chapter four brings us to the real thrust of the study, at least as I perceived it. The author takes up a discussion of myth, fairy tale, and legend (or saga), concluding that Genesis 18-19 incorporates elements of all three. What really absorbs his interest, however, are the motifs, themes, and, particularly, the archetypes, that emerge from a close reading ofthe narrative complex. His indebtedness to the thought of Carl Jung is readily acknowledged. The bottom line is that these stories embody elements of universally shared human experience. Letellier helpfully canvasses a wide array of ancient Near Eastern literature (with some more recent examples as well), showing the prevalence ofthese motifs and archetypes. There is much here that is informative and insightful. My own reading of this section has been enriched by Letellier's observations. A question, however, arises concerning his heavy reliance upon Jungian psychological theory as the master key. That human experience possesses universality seems...

Many of close reading's most enduring assumptions and techniques have their origins in psychological behaviorism. Beginning with I. A. Richards's critical work from the 1920s, this article demonstrates the central place of behaviorist ideas in New Critical theories of poetry. Despite explicitly disparaging Richards's behavioristic poetics, Brooks's Well Wrought Urn and Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" perpetuated behaviorism's influence on literary criticism. This article traces how the New Critics translated behavioristic psychology into poetic formalism and discusses the implications of this for contemporary critical practice.

The concept of authorship seemed uncomplicated, or was at least unexplored, until the second half of the twentieth century; since then it has become the site of much theoretical discussion. Modern literary criticism has not simply underwritten the authority of authors. The American New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, in their Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren, 1938), ruled out the study of biographical materials as a substitute for study of the literary text itself. They raised the issue of whether the reconstruction of an author's intention from the text was at all possible, and, if possible, whether it was even relevant. Soon after, in a famous essay entitled “The intentional fallacy,” the American critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1954) forbade critics to refer to authorial intentions in the analysis of literature, arguing that the literary work itself contained all the information necessary for its understanding and that appeals to authorial intention or biography (disparaged as “Shakespeare's laundry list”) were at best irrelevant, at worst downright misleading.

The concept of authorship seemed uncomplicated, or was at least unexplored, until the second half of the twentieth century, since when it has become the site of much theoretical discussion. Modern literary criticism has not simply underwritten the authority of authors. The American New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their Understanding Poetry (1938), ruled out the study of biographical materials as a substitute for study of the literary text itself. They raised the issue of whether the reconstruction of an author's intention from the text was at all possible, and, if possible, whether it is even relevant. Soon after, in a famous essay entitled “The Intentional Fallacy” (1954), the American critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley forbade critics to refer to authorial intentions in the analysis of literature, arguing that the literary work itself contained all the information necessary for its understanding, and that appeals to authorial intention or biography (disparaged as “Shakespeare's laundry list”) were at best irrelevant, at worst downright misleading.