MARY KATE POSTS:
At one point, Professor Chapman wrote on the board the following sentence: Determining an author's intention is (fill in the blank) important/necessary/useful part of literary interpretations. In my own mind, I like to think that there could have been an all of the above option. Authorial intention is necessary to consider in the way that it is important and useful to consider. However, we can never truly know what an author 's intention is, right? But in my opinion, there is a purpose behind all works and an informed reader can make a best guess as to what that purpose is. But is that all a reader can do? No, of course not. So maybe we can delete all three options. Would is make sense to say that "Determining an author's intention is a part of literary interpretation." Just that, only a piece of the puzzle or only one way to look at a work.
1 comment:
I definitely think that we, as readers, try to determine an author's intention. We want to know why someone wrote what they did--there has to be a reason behind it. An author's intent will never been known for sure because we do not have a relationship with the author, and sometimes authors just do not offer up their intention or interpretation of a work.
I am still a firm believer that using other sources to 'find' the author's intention is not necessary. I think that it can be useful at times, but there has to be something inherent in the work. The intention is in there somewhere, since the text is the words of the author.
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