Intentional Fallacy Research Articles

“Touching the Author's Mind”: Judgment and Intention in Jasper Heywood's Translations of Seneca

This essay draws on the prefatory material in Jasper Heywood's translations of three Senecan tragedies—Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560), and Hercules Furens (1561)—to show that a focus on judgment helps to expound Heywood's theory of translation. The judgments envisioned in these prefatory texts, namely, the evaluative judgments of others and the philological judgments required of the translator, highlight Heywood's understanding of Seneca's original intention as the only true measure of the English translations. For Heywood, there can be no “intentional fallacy” because intention is the only remedy against the difficulties of translation (complexity of the Latin original, deficient sources, unreliability of the printed text). Ultimately Heywood's efforts to approximate Seneca's original “sense,” culminating in the creation of a fictional Seneca, endow the translator with an authorial intention.

The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence

The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne: New Evidence

Categorising C.S. Lewis's Literary Theory

C.S. Lewis's two volumes of literary theory are compared and contrasted with the particular works in mainstream twentieth century literary theory that they most closely resemble. The Personal Heresy is akin to, but ultimately divergent from, the New Critical papers ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’. Likewise An Experiment in Criticism is akin to reader-response theories of the phenomenological variety, especially those of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, and Roman Ingarden, but unlike most other kinds. Lewis's position as a theorist is too reader-focused for New Criticism but also more formalistic than most reader-response theories. Nevertheless, these are the two movements with which his work has most in common, unlike other major twentieth-century movements, such as gender studies, Marxist theory, new historicism, queer theory, postmodernism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism.

David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction ed. by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick

Reviewed by: David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction ed. by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick Michael F. Miller (bio) David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction Edited by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019. xiv + 206 pp. $99 hardback. To the extent that a particular author's body of work can alter a generation's literary-critical sensibilities and rewire the affective infrastructures with which it receives, processes, and transmits the culturally-dominant [End Page 234] structures of feeling, then surely a convincing case can be made on behalf of David Foster Wallace's enduring influence on the present. Published in 2019―12 years after Wallace's suicide––Michael McGowan and Martin Brick's collection David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction captures the ebb and flow of recent critical moods and provides a literary prehistory of sorts to contemporary cultural sensibilities. The core intuition of David Foster Wallace and Religion is that since Wallace's writing explicitly draws on a number of different religious traditions, teasing out these religious influences provides a richer critical account of Wallace's often-strained relation to secular society. There is an unspoken and slightly conservative lament here, in which post-war society's loss of religious belief is something to be mourned. Each contributor to the volume picks up on one of these threads in Wallace's writing and situates it within a broader religious and philosophical frame. For many readers, this approach will yield fresh perspectives and new insights into Wallace's work. Given the sheer range of topics and thinkers addressed in the volume, even the most studied scholar of Wallace will undoubtedly put the collection down having reevaluated his work. The philosophical breadth and scope provided by McGowan and Brick's contributors is one of the collection's main strengths. The chapters here draw on a dazzling array of religious and philosophical traditions, ranging from Christian fundamentalist twelve-step programs (Short); Anglo-American pragmatism (Bolger); Nietzschean nihilism (McGowan); Christian soteriology (Laird); Taoist trans-cultural universalism (Spaulding); Zen Buddhism (Piekarski); and Mormon propaganda, among others. To the editors' credit, they have chosen to work with a broad and inclusive definition of religion that considers equally Western and non-Western religious influences in Wallace's work. Spaulding and Piekarski's chapters on Taoism and Zen Buddhism respectively provide not so much rote Orientalist interpretations of Wallace's work as fresh connections between the literature and the previously-ignored undercurrents of non-Western religious thought in his corpus. Chapters such as these are welcome and exciting, as one might view them as pushing the interpretative boundary into new and unforeseen critical spaces. While there are a number of strong chapters included in the volume, the collection as a whole does occasionally suffer from the limitations imposed on it by its founding critical frame. This is to say that the additive or supplementary approach to criticism—Author X and Subject Y—is necessarily accompanied by its own set of interpretative limits, constraints, and blindspots. Here, these constraints emerge as an overreliance on the intentional fallacy—the appeals to Wallace's biography border on the hagiographic [End Page 235] and are equally unpersuasive to readers who are skeptical of or uninterested in the historical record's ability to provide a "window into Wallace's mind" (188)—and a tendency to evaluate Wallace's work within a literary-historical vacuum. At worst, the additive approach to criticism creates not so much new and interesting questions about an author and their work as it makes possible the conditions by which one might get bogged down in simple tautologies and definitional pedantries. For example, in "Zen Buddhist Philosophy Lurking in the Work of David Foster Wallace," Kryzystof Piekarski poses "his own hypothesis" which suggests that Wallace's popularity can be attributed to the fact that "he implicitly stumbled his way into a Buddhist way of thinking, and unbeknownst to his reading audience, a lived, experiential Buddhist philosophy is what they themselves were starved for in the realm of literature" (176). If one supposes that this "hypothesis" is the chapter's thesis, then the evidence for...

Trans Sonorities in Grey Grant's “Drones for the In-Between Times”

Abstract Composer intent has generally been downplayed by contemporary music analysts, often being regarded as an example of an intentional fallacy at best and misleading at worst. This analysis of Grey Grant's choral work posits that such a dismissal not only ignores the potential for an enhanced expressive context afforded by composers' own assessments, but it also contributes to the silencing of already marginalized voices, such as in the case of transgender composers. The author proposes a methodology that incorporates the voices of living composers while circumventing concerns about confirmation bias by building on the framework of music theory, queer musicology, and queer theory. The article demonstrates this theoretical framework using an interview of a transgender composer to supplement an analysis of their contemporary choral piece. By analyzing the work with the added context of the composer's statements about their own music, the author paints a more complete picture of the work, one that reinvests music analysis with the trans voice behind the composition.

The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present

The Formal Center in Literature is a lively read that returns a consideration of form to the center of the reader's attention. At the outset of his book, Kopley imagines a number of possible criticisms of his approach, from the intentional fallacy to the limitations of logocentrism, but he argues that the study of literature calls for a myriad of diverse perspectives. As he aptly puts it in the introduction, “A blend of approaches is altogether possible, fitting, and desirable. Literature is sufficiently rich and complicated that multiple methodologies may work together” (5). The Formal Center in Literature contributes just one such methodology to our analytical toolkit and reminds us of the critical importance of studying the formal properties of literary works of art. The author's prevailing preoccupation in his latest book is what he calls the “framed centers” of a variety of literary texts selected from a wide range of traditions.The book is divided into fifteen succinct chapters and leads with Kopley's treatment of the authors of the American Renaissance: the first three chapters are devoted to Poe, after which, Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau are each given a chapter of their own. Kopley does not limit his analyses to American Renaissance authors, however. The rest of his book covers a wide range of writers, including chapters on Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, and Zadie Smith. What binds Kopley's investigations is his concentration on locating the framed center of each text he analyzes, by employing an analytical methodology of tracing the verbal symmetries between the first and second halves of each work. Along the way, Kopley offers numerous studied insights, which makes his book a pleasure to read. Most important, he reminds his readers of the importance of concentrating on the formal properties of texts in order to discern how form informs the material content of works of art.Kopley's fascination with framed centers began with his early work on Poe's Pym. In his first chapter, he locates the center of Poe's novel, appropriately enough, in the middle of the text, when Pym's friend, Augustus, dies at sea. Kopley proceeds to read Poe's novel as a personally inflected allegory for the fall and rise of Jerusalem, and connects the mysterious ending of the book with Poe's desire to be reunited with his lost loved ones—namely, his brother and his mother, who are both silently invoked in the novel. In his next two chapters, he applies a similar methodology to Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Gold-Bug,” respectively. The center of Hawthorne's gem of a tale, “Earth's Holocaust,” according to Kopley, lies in the passage wherein the gallows are consumed by the bonfire (and the critic is correct when he asserts that Hawthorne here alludes to John O'Sullivan's opposition to capital punishment). Kopley's chapter on Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is of exceptional quality and stands out in the collection. The critic locates the narrator's recognition of Bartleby's profound loneliness as the point of anchorage for his reading. His analysis focuses on how Bartleby occupies the center of the text, just as the soul may be said to occupy the body (and the spirit to animate the letter), and he reads the tale as Melville's parable of the second coming of Christ. Kopley's brief reading of “The Ponds” as the central chapter in Walden wonderfully exemplifies the interpretive model he employs. In the final eight chapters of his book, Kopley applies his method in a more standardized fashion than in his earlier seven chapters, beginning with his identification of the framed center of each text, followed by a tabular representation of the symmetrical language that he marshals into twin columns to support his interpretations.Kopley's formalist approach could be easily modified and adapted to the examination of several other literary texts, and employed in the classroom to help students develop a taste for aesthetic form. An added value of his book is its emphasis on the analytical pleasure that results from detecting or decoding the formal architecture of a text, and this is another important lesson that could be imparted to students in a variety of contexts. While some literary works may be more amenable to Kopley's methodology than others (consider the central chapter in The Scarlet Letter, for instance, which the author cites as a case in point), his book does a commendable job of stimulating us to read texts not just from start to finish, but from the middle outward in both directions, and then back in again. Finally, it provokes important questions about what constitutes the formal center of a literary text, and how this formal center (framed or otherwise) may be of critical importance to our interpretive art.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics ed. by A. Minh Nguyen

Reviewed by: New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics ed. by A. Minh Nguyen Thomas P. Kasulis (bio) New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics. Edited by A. Minh Nguyen. Lexington Books, Lanham MD, 2018. xxviii, 449 pages. $140.00, cloth; $49.99, paper; $47.50, E-book. This book is probably the most notable contribution in English to the field of Japanese aesthetics published in this century so far and one of the most significant in the past fifty years. My judgment rests on the remarkable range of disciplines and quality of contributors included. The first part of this review surveys that variety and the second raises issues for further study. Significance of the book. Besides the front material, the anthology includes 27 essays by established authorities in Japanese aesthetics from philosophy (Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Allen Carlson, Robert E. Carter, [End Page 294] David E. Cooper, Carol Steinberg Gould, Peter Leech, James McRae, John C. Maraldo, Mara Miller, Steve Odin, Graham Parkes, Yuriko Saito, Jason M. Wirth, and Michiko Yusa); from art/art history (David Bell, Richard Bullen, Mikiko Hirayama, and Matthew Larking); from Japanese language and literature (Cheryl Crowley, Hiroshi Nara, C. Mitchell Rich, J. Thomas Rimer, and Meera Viswanathan); and from Japanese culture/ ethnology and history (Timothy Unverzagt Goddard, Roy Starrs, Akiko Takenaka, and Koji Yamasaki). Not only are the fields multiple, but so are the specific arts addressed: gardens, martial arts, cinema, shakuhachi music, food, poetry, nō, Ainu arts, to name just some. Each essay is a gem, even more valuable for its place in the overall setting. None of the 27 essays is a reprint, each representing the latest thinking of each contributor. The chapters tilt toward contemporary phenomena but often vis-à-vis traditional aesthetic values. The authors address a general college-level audience rather than fellow specialists, making the book ideal for college library collections in either Japan studies or aesthetics/ philosophy of art. (As an anthology, price will guide course adoption.) The foreword by artist and art historian Stephen Addiss is an inviting entrée to the book with historical allusions to two key aspects of Japanese aesthetics: the Japanese appreciation of nature and its multiple (ancient, medieval, and Edo) interactions with China and (in the modern period) with the West. The introduction has two sections, the first being adapted from Saito's "Japanese Aesthetics: Historical Overview" in the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998), edited by Michael Kelly. It was wise to make this the one exception to the rule that each contribution be new. Though concise, Saito's article introduces the general development of Japanese aesthetic ideas, hitting the highlights while introducing key concepts like wabi, sabi, yūgen, and yojō. She also contrasts Japanese aesthetic values with a couple of common Western aesthetic principles such as the "intentional fallacy," the interpretive rule that the artist's intention is irrelevant to the aesthetic evaluation of the artwork. This is a crucial contrast because Western aesthetics typically focuses on the artwork, whereas most Japanese aesthetics focuses on artistry, with the artwork's being only its final manifestation. (Sadly, even some essays in this volume sometimes blur this important difference.) The second section of the introduction is a précis of the book which philosopher-editor A. Minh Nguyen weaves from the authors' own abstracts of their chapters. This idiosyncratic technique works surprisingly well in unifying the volume, inviting the reader to peruse it in sequence instead of following the hopscotch approach more common in reading anthologies. Part 1 has essays by Carter, Cooper, Bullen, Odin, and Saito under the rubric of "Japanese Aesthetics and Philosophy." The most common theme (often associated by the authors with Zen Buddhism, an etiology I question [End Page 295] later in this review) is the aesthetic dissolution of the gap between subject and object, self and other, or humanity and nature, a unification achieved by dissolving the ego into its focus. The discussions include training within a communal context, appreciating the vague or hidden (where, as I explain below, mikkyō might have been influential), and cultivating expert knowledge—all with implications for ethical and spiritual, as well as aesthetic, development. Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Nishida Kitarō serve...

The Ethical Implications of The Intentional Fallacy

I argue that biographical information is akin to other non-aesthetic, social, historical, or political information. As such, artist’s biographies are always relevant and important when interpreting art. While the meaning and value of a piece of art is not determined by any single piece of contextual information, neither is its meaning and value ever entirely separated from context. In some cases, however, a piece of art that is technically magnificent may be experienced as repugnant when the artist has committed egregious acts.

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

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

Idea of Authorial Intent in “The Intentional Fallacy” by Wimsatt and Beardsley

“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.

The Ethical Implications of the Intentional Fallacy

I argue that biographical information is akin to other non-aesthetic, social, historical, or political information. As such, artist’s biographies are always relevant and important when interpreting art. While the meaning and value of a piece of art is not determined by any single piece of contextual information, neither is its meaning and value ever entirely separated from context. In some cases, however, a piece of art that is technically magnificent may be experienced as repugnant when the artist has committed egregious acts.

My Philip Roth

My Philip Roth Debra Shostak (bio) Halfway through a year I was devoting to writing a book about his work, Philip Roth appeared to me for the first time in a dream. He said little; in fact, he seemed interested only in talking to my husband rather than to me. He stayed on the fringes of the dream, looking sternly over at me once or twice, until the dream shifted away, as dreams do, and I was startled awake by the disappearance of my quarry. I was lying at my in-laws' house on a sofa bed, a rather inadequate contraption that slopes lumpily upward from your feet to your head, so you feel as though you should be rising rather than sleeping, restless, and guilty for your sloth. It was a Christmas in Wisconsin without snow, so desperately wished for by my children, like the outline of a story where the plot hasn't been filled in. That's how my dream felt, too. Of course, I knew that it wasn't Philip Roth in the dream, it was me, or so psychoanalytic wisdom tells me, since it was my dream and not the real world in which I very nearly met the man I was spending all my days thinking about. But if Philip Roth was me, then my husband must have been me, too, which confusingly means that I did get to speak to Roth, though really I was talking inaudibly to myself and never heard his side of the conversation. I didn't meet Philip Roth in the dream, couldn't fill in the outlines that my waking imagination could color in just so far. Had I done so, I would have betrayed the fraught work of imagining subjectivities that Roth spent a career exploring, perhaps best captured in that riveting paragraph in American Pastoral in which Zuckerman confesses that "The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again" (Pastoral 35). That, the writer admits, is the work of imaginative writing. It's getting people wrong that is living. It's also the work of imaginative reading. That's what's so vital about reading, getting people wrong in all those ways that are right for us, at the moment and from wherever we are sitting. The experience of a dream is like the experience of reading a book, where [End Page 135] we people the pages with our own resistant, three-dimensional images of the reality we know must exist, just as we know it. The beautiful wrongness of our reading depends on how reality is always slipping away from us, even as we form it into pictures and provocations and things that seem substantial until they aren't. Our subject—and subjectivity—when we read includes not only the "people" within the written world but also the person writing that world, and one of those persons is, well, me the reader, improbably decked out as an impersonation of the writer. Of course, this is exactly what we literary scholars have scorned for years, ever since Wimsatt and Beardsley explained the intentional fallacy, and it is one of the first things we teach our students. Fiction is not autofiction, we assert; how naïve not to assume a stance of distance and detachment from texts that are only constructed storyworlds. Yet one might suggest that Wimsatt and Beardsley had to invent the fallacy because that is exactly what most readers do, and long to do; how else to establish a priesthood of readers? In any case, however obvious it seems when I express the thought, this notion—that we (rightly!) misread texts and others, and that among those texts and others we misread count the authors of our fantasies—has been one of the most intriguing, divertingly frustrating, enduringly pleasurable lessons that three decades of reading and rereading Roth have given to me, and much more forcefully and meaningfully than all the psychoanalytic and reception theories I've encountered to explain this project of intimate...

Intentions in Theory and Practice

The ‘intentional fallacy’ and pronouncements of the ‘death of the author’ supported the hermeneutical flights of fancy that characterized the ‘New Musicology’ of the 1980s and early 1990s, but mesh less well with more recent New-Historicist impulses. Anti-intentionalism is motivated by a belief in the autonomy of art, a belief most musicologists today reject. Our interest in composers’ working documents and correspondence also conflicts with anti-intentionalist methodologies. Due to the diversity of current musicology, no one stance towards interpretation will describe all interpretative activities in our field. Nevertheless, for those interested in understanding musical works and performances as the products of human endeavour, I argue that moderate actual intentionalism is the theory that best describes practices directed towards this aim. Its chief advocates—Paisley Livingston, Robert Stecker, and Noël Carroll—are philosophers in the analytic tradition. This article, thus, provides a glimpse of what musicology might gain from taking a greater interest in work in this field.

Meaning Meaning

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.

A new audience for Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia: In conversation with the author

This article, in the form of a conversation between novelist Justine Ettler and literary and cultural studies scholar Rebecca Johinke, looks back at the reception of the Australian novel The River Ophelia in 1995. It also looks forward to speculate how audiences may read the novel in 2018 and beyond, given that in October 2017 it was re-released in e-book format with a new Author’s Note and Introduction (Ettler 2017a). The River Ophelia was a publishing sensation in Australia in the mid-90s as it describes sadistic and masochistic sex and domestic violence. Due to early reviews and the way it was marketed, it was labelled as ‘dirty realism’ or ‘grunge’. In this article, the authors argue for a re-appraisal of the text as a feminist parody and as a highly intertextual postmodern work. In and through their conversation, Johinke and Ettler reveal the extent to which genre confusion, and the question of what is and isn’t ‘real’ dominated the reception of the text at the time of its initial release, and how the intentional fallacy in cases where an author is conflated with a character can be adopted unselfconsciously, and indeed manipulated by, publishers and critics in the marketplace. In light of recent feminist activism around domestic violence and sexual abuse, such as the #MeToo campaign, the authors also discuss the depiction of domestic violence in The River Ophelia, and how certain representations of sex and female desire might play out in representations of abusive relationships. The question of what is and is not erotic, pornographic, or romantic literature is also discussed, both in relation to The River Ophelia, and in relation to several other controversial texts that have been published since its first release.

Forum Introduction: Intention and the Eighteenth-Century Text

Forum Introduction: Intention and the Eighteenth-Century Text Mark Vareschi (bio) and Jess Keiser (bio) At least since W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), intention has played an uneasy role in the interpretation of cultural artifacts. In the wake of their seminal essay, critics warred over the meaning, use, and abuse of intention in art and culture. While the 1970s and 1980s saw writers of a post-structuralist persuasion radicalizing Wimsatt and Beardsley’s attack by linking the latter’s fallacy with their own anti-humanist stance, the 1990s witnessed a resurgence of critics defending intention as an analytic category. These decades demonstrated that more was at stake in debates about intention than critical praxis; ethics, politics, and institutional formations were all tied into how one understood intention. It is easy to assume that, with the new millennium, the debates about intention that exercised Wimsatt, Beardsley, and their heirs have fallen by the wayside. But the following essays tell a different story. The problem of intention has persisted in cultural criticism, and it is arguably at the heart of a number of innovative, new approaches in eighteenth-century studies. From new materialism’s reappraisal of agency, which has raised questions about the relation between the actions and intentions of actors both human and non-human, to digital humanities’ scaling up of its objects of analysis to the point where intention may well be regarded as a collective, rather [End Page 209] than individual, phenomenon, intention has been a persistent—if rarely explicit—concern in recent critical work. These essays look to the eighteenth century as a key period for thinking through the problems and potentials of intention. They seek new ways of defining the concept by exploring Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary; surveying the reception of Beethoven’s music as a way of reclaiming intention for contemporary criticism; looking to Defoe’s Crusoe to consider the friction between a person’s motivations and actions; and discovering in eighteenth-century pornography a conception of intention that belongs not to individual bodies but to larger collectives. In doing so, they are building on important recent work in eighteenth-century studies that has turned away from earlier rejections of intention. Frances Ferguson’s important essay “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” with its nuanced examination of the role intention plays in eighteenth-century legal fictions, arguably sparked this resurgent interest in the topic. Following Ferguson, Jonathan Kramnick’s Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson and Sandra Macpherson’s Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form demonstrate that there is more at stake in eighteenth-century accounts of intention than efforts to confirm or dismiss the plans and designs ostensibly hidden away in the author’s mind. By asking us to rethink the relationship between willful subjects and the actions they (ostensibly) intend, Kramnick’s and Macpherson’s books reveal the ethical, political, and even ontological stakes of eighteenth-century writings on intention. In this work, intention is neither the bogeyman to be avoided nor the master key to textual interpretation; intention becomes one feature among many requiring interpretation. The essays in this forum reflect this expanded account of intention. Basing themselves on Ferguson’s, Kramnick’s, and Macpherson’s seminal writings, they reconsider the place of intention in the creation, reception, and content of cultural objects. Stephanie Hershinow raises the question of disciplinary difference in accounts of, and engagements with, intention and intentionality in literary studies and analytical philosophy. Sarah Ellenzweig considers the ongoing material turn in humanities scholarship, which asks us to attribute agency and intention not simply to human beings but also to non-human things. The essay combats the presentism of this “new materialism” by tracing its concerns to a cluster of eighteenth-century texts. Edmund Goehring argues for the continued relevance of artistic and authorial intention in the work of interpretation. Crucial to his argument is an account of artistic objects as actions or utterances in which intention may be read off the objects themselves. By thinking about the relationship between intending and remembering, Sarah Eron seeks to overcome the mind-matter binary. Her essay argues that only minds embodied in...

Theory to Die for: Lunging at the Arras in Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”

In this article I argue that Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” shares remarkable structural similarities with Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Although both works have often been read as parodies of literary critics, they both also toy with the serious possibility that the pursuit of a literary theory might resemble an erotic obsession, and might result in, not the death of the author, but the death of the critic. To better understand the ways in which Wilde and James approach literary criticism in Portrait and “Figure” I consider their shared investment in Shakespeare, who figures in both authors’ work as a larger-than-life exemplar of authorial mastery, while simultaneously functioning as a textual corpus extractable from its author, a space that opens up creative possibilities for the critic. James’s late works on Shakespeare (his short story, “The Birthplace” (1903) and his preface to The Tempest (1907)) reveal a central conflict between James’s devotion to an autonomous artwork and his desire for an all-masterful author. Reading James’s late writings on Shakespeare, in conjunction with the ways his stories about literary criticism prefigure one strand of New Criticism-- Wimsatt and Beardsley’s positing of the intentional fallacy-- can help us understand the apparent paradoxes in James’s relationship to Shakespeare, and in his portrayals of literary critics, and literary criticism.

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

The Question of “Allusiveness” and Canto 39

My title cites a phrase in William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy,” and my excuse for returning to an article published seventy years ago is that the question the...