I have lately been struggling a lot with what my exact views are pertaining to authorial intent. In viewing the other discussions on this blog so far, I was surprised that no one has yet talked about authorial intent seeing as it comes up in class quite often. Today, we were discussing the Joyce article and New Historicism and whether we thought that what author writes is intended or not. Many difficult questions came up in class in a very short time. For example, are selves entirely unified? If not (the conclusion that we seemed to come to in class), does this mean that what an author writes is also not unified? How much of what an author writes is intended and, leading from this, how much does authorial intent matter?
Before this class, I used to place a very high importance on authorial intent when analyzing literature. But now I am not so sure. For one thing, how do we know that information compiled about an author is true? What if we are given false information given by, say a neighbor of the author, and the neighbor just told false things about the author just to be in the news? Unless we were there while the author was writing a piece of literature, how can we truly know that the context that we are told that the literature was written in is really true? Ought we then to rely solely on the text and only what we think that the author is trying to say in it? On the other hand, everything that an author writes about is from their own personal experience and, if we know about, say the death of a family member of the author, this might have a huge impact on that person’s writing and I firmly believe that this is very central in understanding the author’s work.
Is anyone else confused or does anyone else have any “words of wisdom” as to how they determine how much value to attach to authorial intent? Sorry for the long post!
~ Kristen
