Intention and Interpretation
Some Words
Criticism: Is this a good work of art (or the opposite)? Is
it worth preserving (or not)? Worth recommending?
(And, if so, why?)
Interpretation: What does this work of art mean? What
is its semantic content?
Hermeneutics: The art and science of interpretation
(originally of scripture, later literature, still later human
experience as such).
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Literary Art vs. The Rest
 Virtually all literary art communicates by means of
language—a system of public signs. Yet works of literary
art are (normally) the work of a private individual, an
author.
 So perhaps it seems natural to ask certain questions
about the meaning of literary art as part of judging its
value:
What did the author intend to say? Did she succeed in
saying it? Assuming we have identified ‘her’ meaning
correctly, is it worth paying attention to?
An Open Question: Does non-literary art also rest on a
public system of signs? (Dewey, you’ll recall, suggests
something along these lines. Jung too, though in a rather
different sense.)
If so, then we might say that (mutatis mutandis), when it
comes to interpretation: author ≈ artist.
If not, then literary art (and other art insofar as it uses
public signs) may be exceptional.
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The Intentional Fallacy
William K. Wimsatt (1907-75): English professor at Yale
Monroe Beardsley (1915-85): Philosophy professor at
Temple University, author/editor of several books in
aesthetics
 Their essay (together with its sequel, “The Affective
Fallacy”) has become one of the central documents of
formalist “new criticism”
The Intentional Fallacy
“…[is] a confusion between the poem and its origins...it
begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from
the psychological causes of the poem and ends in
biography and relativism.”
 In fact, say W&B, the intentions of the author “are neither
available nor desirable as a standard for judging the
success of a work of literary art.” (431)
 Of course an author is (usually) the cause of a poem, but
we needn’t (or shouldn’t) look to the author’s intention (or
circumstances) to judge the worth of a poem…
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Some ‘Axioms”
 If the poet succeeded in realizing her intentions, then the
evidence of those intentions will be seen directly in the
poem.
If the poet did not succeed, then the poem itself cannot
be adequate evidence for her intentions. (We would
have to look elsewhere: biography, diaries, history…)
 W&B: “Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a
machine,” we ask only that it work (432)
Three Types of Evidence
1. Internal: Public evidence "discovered through the
semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual
knowledge of the language, through grammars,
dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of
dictionaries, in general through all that makes a
language and culture.”
2. External: Private or idiosyncratic evidence “not part of
the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations …
about how or why the poet wrote the poem.”
3. Intermediate/Contextual: “private or semiprivate
meanings attached to words or topics by an author.”
e.g., special meanings assigned to words.
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 Internal evidence, including historical knowledge about,
e.g., genre, meter, traditions of the art form – is the
appropriate subject matter for literary criticism.
 External evidence, being in principle private, is fodder
merely for “author psychology,” literary biography—or
just gossip (436).
 Contextual evidence is where the greatest danger of
committing the intentional fallacy lies: It easily shades
into a concern with external, private evidence. It may
contribute to our understanding of a poem, but it leaves
the grounds for that understanding ambiguous.
(E.g., Donne and the ‘new astronomy’, 437-8)
The Upshot
 Preoccupation with the author and her intentions “leads
away from the poem.”
 Criticism ought to focus first and foremost on what is
there is the poem/art work. Reference to contextual
information may be fair game in establishing a work’s
meaning, but it cannot be decisive.
External evidence belongs not to criticism, but to literary
biography (or publicity)…
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 …and, in any case, the intentions of poet are not
decisive (or even necessary) is establishing a poem’s
meaning.
 A poem does not belong to its author, instead, “it is
detached from the author at birth and goes about the
world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.
The poem belongs to the public.” (432)
Barthes: The Death of the Author
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Roland Barthes (1915 -1980)
 French social and literary critic; taught at
various places, including École Pratique
des Hautes Études, the University of
Alexandria, Johns Hopkins University.
 Principally interested not in aesthetic theory per se, but
in semiotics (the study of signs and signification), which
he applied to a wide variety of cultural, artistic, and
literary productions: language, films, photography,
fashion, politics.
 Associated with the term “[post-]structuralism” (locating
cultural products within a [unstable] system of signs).
The Author: A Creature of Modernity
“The author is a modern figure, a product of our society
insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English
empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of
the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the
individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’.
It is thus logical that in literature it should be this
positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist
ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to
the person of the author.” (383)
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 For “us,” by contrast, “it is language that speaks, not the
author”
(Compare: Hirsch’s dismissal of semantic autonomy)
The Author: The past of his own book, its source of
nourishment, his offspring. The book is a performance
attributable to him.
The (Post) Modern Scriptor: The hand that inscribes
the book, cut off from any voice except that of language
itself. The book is a performative that he utters.
The Text
 “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from
innumerable centres of culture”
The writer/scriptor does not, cannot write to express the
originality of his genius, “his only power is to mix
writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such way
as never to rest with any of them”
“…a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from
many cultures and entering into mutual relations of
dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place
where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the
reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author” (385)
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The Reader and The ‘Author-god’
 So, the text has no single ‘theological’ meaning; it is a
public space.
The unity of the text, “lies not in its origin but in its
destination”
 But: The reader too is simply a location in the system of
signs and meanings: “the reader is without history,
biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who
holds together in a single field all the traces by which the
written text is constituted.”
The Birth of the Reader
 For the New Critics (for Romantics? for intentionalists,
formalists, and expression theorists of all stripes?) the
writer was really the only important person in literature.
 Having dispensed with the Author-god, however, the text
is no longer closed, no longer limited to a single
theological meaning.
A myth has been overthrown: “The birth of the reader
must come at the cost of the death of the author.” (386)
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Hirsch: In Defense of the Author
E.D. Hirsch (1928- )
 Professor emeritus of literature at the
University of Virginia; longtime critic (though
a very sensitive critic) of continental fashions
in aesthetics and literary theory; lately an exponent of
“cultural literacy” (‘core knowledge’)
In recent years, a critic of (certain aspects of, or the
worst excesses of) poststructuralism and
postmodernism.
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 In “In Defense of the Author” (from Validity in
Interpretation (1967)), Hirsch focuses on the idea of
semantic autonomy, an idea variously connected with
continental philosophy (Heidegger and Gadamer), the
Jungian idea of collective unconscious meanings, and
New Critical fashions founded on Wimsatt and
Beardsley…
 Against all of these views, Hirsch argues for the
“sensible belief that text means what its author meant”
 Hirsch’s argument proceeds by way challenging four
arguments that purport to establish the semantic
autonomy of the work and/or the interpretive irrelevance
of the author.
 What is at stake, for Hirsch, is the very idea of validity in
interpretation. Meanings, says Hirsch, must be publicly
verifiable affairs of human consciousness…
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 A text must represent somebody’s meaning, “if not the
author’s, then the critic’s” (or the reader’s)
This is because meaning occurs not in words, but in
consciousness: “A word sequence means nothing in
particular until somebody either means something by it or
understands something by it” (373)
 People make meaning, and this does indeed leave room
for variability in interpretation. But, says Hirsch, we need
to seek a valid interpretation.
Otherwise what grounds will the professor have for
claiming that his reading is better than that of his
pupil…!?
Four ‘Arguments Against the Author’
1. “The meaning of the text changes–even for the
author”
If the meaning of text for its author does change, this
would be fatal to the normative claim that the author’s
meaning ought to guide interpretation.
But the author’s meaning does not really change: The
author’s response to her text may change, her
evaluation of its significance may change, but, says
Hirsch, what this shows is precisely she can still identify
her original meaning (e.g., in order to repudiate it, or
restate it)
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2. “It does not matter what an author means – only
what his text says”
An author—e.g., Eliot—may claim that he has no
special privilege to assign an authoritative interpretation
to his text. But, Hirsch asserts, an author would never
go so far as to say that she didn’t mean anything in
particular by her writings.
OK. We might then say, with Wimsatt and Beardsley,
that we ought to look to the text itself (and, so far as
possible, only to the text) for evidence of its meaning…
 That’s fine, says Hirsch, when it comes to judging artistic
success or failure (i.e., to judging value), but the
intentional fallacy has no proper application to assessing
the verbal meaning of a text.
 Similarly, an author may sometimes intend a certain text
to mean X, while virtually everyone who reads that text
takes it to mean Y. In view of such cases, we might be
tempted to say that the meaning of the work is whatever
attracts a public consensus…
(Cf. “reader response” criticism)
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 But appealing to the ‘vox populi’ cannot provide us with
stable normative concept on which to base
interpretation: In interpreting texts, people (necessarily)
all use the same public norms, the same system of
signs, yet they disagree about meaning.
 Yet, pace new criticism/formalism, we cannot simply look
to the text in order to establish its meaning. Once again,
linguistic signs must be interpreted by someone before
they can become meaningful.
That ‘someone’, if we are after a valid interpretation of a
literary text, should not be the critic, it cannot (reliably)
be the public…so, sensibly, it should be the author.
3. “The author’s meaning is inaccessible”
True: We cannot get inside an author’s head. We have
no access to genuinely private meaning experience.
But, Hirsch asks:
a) Does any actual criticism truly try ‘to get inside an
author’s head’? and
b) Is ‘private meaning experience’ (as opposed to
intended meaning) what authors actually express?
(Compare: Expression theory à la Collingwood)
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 None of us, author’s included, can have complete,
certain access to all aspects of experience that might be
affecting our utterances (or that we might ‘have in mind’
when writing).
 What we actually say (what authors actually write) is
normally what we understand to be sharable meaning
(as opposed to ‘everything that happens to be going
through our mind’).
We may not be able to know an author’s meaning with
certainty (and none of us can know all of the meaning
experiences that may condition meaning), but that does
not mean that meaning is inaccessible in principle.
4. “The author often does not know what he means”
If we could show (as Plato suspected) that authors often
do not really know what their works mean, then, once
again, this would be fatal to the normative claim that the
author’s meaning ought to guide interpretation.
But in what sense can authors be said to be ignorant
about the meaning of their work?
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 A critic may draw out new implications of a work with
respect to its subject matter (Kant, e.g., may see
implications of Plato’s philosophy of which Plato himself
was apparently unaware), but this is then about the
subject matter, not the meaning of the work.
 A critic may draw out unconscious meanings in a work,
but Hirsch insists, we must see these as the
unconsciously intended meanings of the author…
But Why?
 Why? Why the author and not, say, language or culture
(as reflected through/channeled by the author)?
 Possibly this is simply a reassertion of Hirsch’s view that
the author’s meaning must turn out to have normative
semantic value.
“The meanings that are actualized by the reader are
either shared with the author or belong to the reader
alone…” (382)
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