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
8 comments:
On one hand, it can be argued that the author always intends whatever the author writes and that at different points in time the same author might have very different intentions. On the other hand, an author may in some cases write something he or she did not intend. So where does one draw the line when interpreting a text while looking at authorial intent?
For example, if the author misspells a letter it is usually just looked at as an error in intention. Editing procedures correct these errors. But, if the text has something like a run-on sentence, is it just assumed that the author wanted that sentence run on? Or did he or she at a later date or time re-read their work and regret writing that sentence that way? Can we really put that much pressure on the author to say that every detail in his/her piece of work is meant by the author to be there? And if we can’t depend on the author to intend everything he or she writes how can we depend on the author for anything he or she writes?
-Kim Stabosz
I also find it difficult to determine an author's intentions while interpreting a text. As Kim asks, where does one draw the line?
I don't think we should necessarily rely on what are thought to be an author's intentions when studying literature (as Kristin says, we weren't there!). We must certainly, however, take authorial intent into consideration, and I think the best way to do that is through context.
If we consider James Joyce, for example, we may run into a great deal of difficulty interpreting works like "Dubliners" or "Ulysses" without recalling that Joyce wrote during a time when Irish nationality was frequently scrutinized. While none of us were there in the early 1900s to confirm that idea, context helps us to at least gain ONE understanding of, for example, Joyce's disdain for the clergy.
With that said, I am curious as to whether or not there are texts in which we cannot depend on the author. If we completely remove the author's intent from our own interpretations, won't we essentially be missing something?
-Marcus Mitchell
In high school, my English teacher told me that to assume we know an author's intent behind a work is committing the "intentional fallacy." We can never know what an author intended; we can speculate and correlate certain influences such as, as Kim said, the death of a family member that might have affected the author's writing.
New Historicists look for connections between the events surrounding an author contextually and the author's writing but I'm also fairly sure that we can only know influences that /might/ have affected the author; we cannot /know/.
Emily F.
I know what you mean, Kristen. I feel like i used to assume that the goal in interpreting literature was to find the author's intent, or at least my teacher's interpretation. but now i feel like authorial intent should almost be left out of the equation--we have no idea what Joyce was thinking and he's not here to tell us.
i do feel like, though, that it is at least worth while to look at the information we do have about the context the author lived and wrote in, to the extent that we have information about it. like marcus referred to, we know that joyce lived in ireland at a time of great controversy and national unrest. i think it is a mistake to ignore this history when we interpret joyce, but at the same time, taking the history into account doesn't mean that we are trying to figure out what joyce meant. i think it more means that we are trying to understand more of what may have inspired joyce to write what he did. however, this meaning should be combined with the meaning we extract from the text that we relate to our own lives. for example, if we see undertones of political unrest in joyce, we may connect it to situations in our time and country, allowing us to relate to the text on a level beyond authorial intent and the context in which the text was written. i think the fusion of these two things is what really leads to our interpretation.
Amy, I agree. I guess for me, the question of authorial intent has been wrapped up with another question raised in class: "Is there a right interpretation?" It is a very tough question, and some people seem very convinced that there is a right answer, or many right answers, or at least a definite wrong answer. For my part, I think its very dangerous to look to literature to provide any concrete, definite answer. It is very interesting to look at the author's life and historical context, but there needs to be room for other things. I think at the end of the day, whatever a particular reader sees in a text, how it moves them, is valid. It doesn't have to be right for everyone, as long as it speaks to that person.
Megan brings up another very relevant issue. Is there a right interpretation for any one piece of literature? My immediate response is no. I think that Megan made a very interesting point that “at the end of the day, whatever a particular reader sees in a text, how it moves them, is valid.” After all, we are all different and each person shapes the literature that they read, probably involuntarily, to their own experiences, thoughts, and interests. Since this is the case, how can there ever be one right interpretation? Well, there can’t.
However, I wonder if this can be said while also believing that some interpretations are more “right” than others. Does there have to first be a single correct interpretation in order to say that one interpretation is “better” than another?
~ Kristen
An author's intention behind a work conveys a certain meaning, and they carefully construct each element of their work in order to fulfill a certain role within the overall interpretation of the piece. For example, Fish ignored the original intention of the work and instead asked his students to view the list as poetry. Does it make a difference that the intentions behind the list and the poem were different? I think so, since it affects the way in which the interpretative tools function once applied to each work. Comments on this idea?
As you might have already guessed, I think authorial intent--whether the author felt he/she had or has an intent--is bunk. Less harshly, it simply seems unimportant: Shakespeare may have intended for a play to indicate one thing, but is the play any less relevant to us because we happen to interpret it differently? Isn't one of the great powers of literature its flexibility? Our ability to look at it, again and again, and see something different, something that is contextually valuable each time?
I would also say that Emily's view that "New Historicists look for connections between the events surrounding an author contextually and the author's writing" is *not* an explanation of an attempt to arrive at authorial meaning, but to understand more closely what the culture of the space/time was of the author. By researching the author's life, time, where she wrote we are not necessarily trying to answer "now, what did Emily Dickinson think this one was about," but to understand how the culture of that specific place and time may have influenced the culturally-based writing of the text. Fine line, but important.
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