Essay 1- Is there any middle ground between theories of interpretation that locate the meaning of a text in

the author’s intention, or those that locate it in the reception of a text by a community of readers?

Throughout literary theory we can see the division of critics who believe that the meaning of a text
is found within the author, and those who believe it is found within the reader’s interpretations. But as
these are two extremes, there are bound to be problems in realizing such stringent theories: extremes often
fail in practical implementation. Intentionalism and Constructivism make up the two aforementioned
extremes, while Formalism is the middle ground in which the meaning of texts can be located. In this essay
we will examine the premises of each theory, and consider its objections with reference to classic
literature.

Intentionalism states that the meaning of a work is determined by the author’s intentions. That is to
say, we must understand what the author meant when he wrote the text in order to fully understand the text
itself. According to E.D. Hirsch, a literary critic, intentionalism implies that there is a wrong and a right
answer when interpreting a work, and the readers must discover the pre-existing meaning embedded in the
text. Another advocate of intentionalism, Richard Wollheim, takes a slightly different approach. He
believes that interpretation is a matter of understanding, and therefore the reader must understand the
process of writing the work in order to understand the work itself. He believes that creating a work is an
action which is guided by the intention to create, and so the text is a physical embodiment of the author’s
intentions. The intentionalist theory can be seen as rationally important when reading a text. All readers
come across simple phrases that have multiple meanings, and turn to the supposed author’s intentions in
order to select the correct meaning and disregard the others. For example, the simple phrase “My car ran
out of gas” can have several different meanings. If we literally interpret this phrase, we may find ourselves
believing its meaning to be “My Pullman dashed from a cloud of argon”. Here we see how important it is
to consider the author’s intentions when writing this phrase. A better example of the importance of
intentions can be found within William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems. It is within these poems that some
reader’s believe that Lucy is really dead, and others believe that she is more alive than ever.
Intentionalism, however, like all theories, does have its problems. When interpreting a work, how
does the reader know whether to choose the semantic or artistic meaning? If we are guessing the author’s
intentions, how do we know what to evaluate and what to ignore? This leads to the problem of actually
knowing the author’s intentions: how can we know what Shakespeare intended when writing King Lear? A
common reply to this objection is that intentions are not private experiences, and so we can estimate what
each author intended. This objection is known as the “Intentionalist Fallacy”, which suggests that “even

1
when we have access to the author’s intentions through a direct statement, this statement is only an act of
self interpretation by the author and for us can only be another text.”1 This means that even if Shakespeare
had left us a note explaining what he was aiming to do when writing his play, it would only serve as
another text to be interpreted, and prove useless when actually trying to understand the intentions behind
King Lear, as Shakespeare himself would be trying to interpret his own intentions after the fact. Putting
aside the crux of the matter, which is that we can never really know the author’s intentions, we still find
ourselves faced with more problems. Unintended features of a work, for instance, make it difficult for the
reader to know which interpretation was truly meant by the author. For example, two sentences could have
the same syntax or rhyme scheme without the author’s intent to do so, so how do we know whether that
was intended and should be included in our analysis and interpretation, or if it should be disregarded?
Intentionalists would reply that unconscious meanings created within the text still count as intentions, but
if the author did not consciously intend something than how can it be an intention at all- how can the
readers attempt to guess an author’s intentions if he himself is not even aware of them? Aside from
unconscious intentions, we also find ourselves faced with failed intentions. What if the author fails at what
he set out to do when writing his text? If, for example, in The Divine Comedy, Dante’s intention was to
simply catalogue and understand the stages of afterlife (Heaven, Purgatory and Hell), and due to his lack of
impartiality, he ended up writing a trilogy that delves deep into the human understanding of God’s love
and serves as a warning for the sins of modern society, then he would have failed at his intentions and our
presuppositions on his intentions would be completely wrong. In guessing the intentions incorrectly we
end up limiting the scope of the author. That is, if we guess the author’s intentions in one work are based
on his biographical tendencies, we confine his artistic growth and limit his ability to have surpassed
himself. An excellent example can be found in Shakespeare, where we base a lot of our interpretation of
his sonnets on our knowledge of his biographical history. It is also worth considering that many authors
write for the therapeutic catharsis and self exploration that authoring a text brings. With that in mind, if an
author never intends to have his work published, how can we guess the intention he is trying to convey to
the reader, when he never intended for there to be a reader at all? Furthermore, how can a catharsis of
emotion be thought to have an intention behind it- when its entire point is that it is an expulsion or purging
of feelings? Finally, the most important question of all: does an author really have intentions at all? Plato
states in Ion that poets receive a divine inspiration from the gods. That suggests that their creation is
caused by a supernatural and ethereal concept which uses them (the individuals) as vehicles for the

1
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

2
creation. If this were so, then surely an author who is inspired does not have an intention, for he is simply
writing as a vessel for the source of his inspiration.

On the opposite side of the spectrum in which Intentionalism lays we find Constructivism, a reader
response theory which states that the interpreters of the work create its meaning. This is seen as a
pluralistic approach as different audiences will undoubtedly allow for different interpretations of a single
text. Roland Barthes’s work “The Death of the Author” explains how the author is a modern construct
from the Reformation, a historical period which advocated ideologically the rise of the individual. Barthes
explains that the author’s role is tyrannical because of the authority and god-like power it gives to an
author over his text, leading the author to become oppressive and thus limit the readers from multiple
interpretations of the text. In the author’s absence there is no fixed meaning, and so intention ceases to be
present as the author severs himself from his text. He says that “as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with
a view to acting directly on reality..the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death”2, which
is also echoed by Jacques Derrida, who believes that “writing, unlike in spoken speech, the author is no
longer present; writing is cast out to be variously analysed and understood”3. Both these critics note the
benefits in disregarding the author’s intentions when interpreting a text: without the author there is a
multiplicity of meanings and an empowerment of the readers.
Whilst being a theory that offers more flexibility in interpretation than Intentionalism, this
flexibility leads it to its major downfall: this argument allows all writing to mean anything the audience
wants, which makes having a variety of texts pointless. In the most extreme example, everyone who
attempts to read a work could decide a different meaning from the text, and thus we would need only one
text, as everyone would interpret it differently. There is also a problem when we consider that some
interpretations are quite obviously wrong, which constructivism does not allow for. For instance, if we
were to suggest that Shakespeare based his works on T.S. Eliot’s, this interpretation of Shakespeare would
be historically impossible, and thus proved wrong. However, the constructivist theory suggests that if the
reader extracts that meaning from the text, it is not incorrect, regardless. When inspecting the theory we
can also see that it does not logically follow that a lack of authorial presence doesn’t necessarily entail that
the intention ceases to govern the meaning of the work.

Stanley Fish, another literary critic, created a modification to the argument in which the meaning
of the text is determined by “interpretive communities”. That is, he suggested that all interpretation is

2
The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern: Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
3
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Jacques Derrida, “Of Grammatology”

3
determined by a context, be it social or institutional. Texts inherently don’t exist, since semantic rules
aren’t stable and there are various possible interpretations. This leads to texts not existing independently of
these communities and thus meanings not existing independently of these communities either, and so we
find that meaning is relative to each community. But by creating these interpretive communities, the
meaning still remains relative to the interpreters. Are all the communities relevant to each other? Fish
argues that each individual cannot change or step out of their designated community, but that doesn’t prove
that relativism isn’t dominating this theory. It is also unrealistic to say that all interpretive communities are
equally relevant, not to mention the regression that the idea of interpretive communities creates: you would
need to know about the community to understand its interpretation of the text, which seems to bring us
back to a detached form of intentionalism. Another major flaw in the constructivist argument can be found
when we consider translations. To translate a text is to preserve its meaning in another language, which is
impossible according to this theory, as there is no meaning to preserve until the work is read.

In between intentionalism and constructivism we find formalism, which states that the work stands
on its own independently of the author, and its meaning is found within its “form”. William Wimsatt and
Monroe Beardsley stated in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy” that intentions are irrelevant to a work’s
meaning, with the exception of linguistic intentions. That is, when reading a work the reader should ignore
the external evidence about how and why the author wrote the work and only consider the text as a stand-
alone work completely independent of its creator, with the exception of the linguistic syntax that is subject
to the vernacular and context of the author’s time. The idea of formalism springs from one of the main
dilemmas for intentionalism: it is irrelevant to know the intentions of the author, because if the work
succeeds then the intent is successfully conveyed; if the work fails then the intention doesn’t even appear
within the text, and so the knowledge of it is irrelevant. Formalism is grounded in an epistemic argument:
the intention of a work is in the author’s mind, but we are capable of interpreting a work without knowing
what is within the author’s mind, and therefore the meaning of a work cannot be based on its author’s
intentions. The solution formalism puts forward is to find the meaning of a text through close readings and
sensible allusions, without appealing to the author’s intentions.

The problems arise when we consider that if we don’t know the intention we cannot know the
meaning of the allusion in the work. Different societies and time periods will alter the allusions as history
continues. For example, how can we know if T.S. Eliot in the lines “I have heard the mermaids singing,

4
each to each”4 in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is alluding to John Donne’s line in Song: “Teach me
to heare Mermaides singing”5? It would be impossible to write to Eliot to ask him what his intention with
that line was, so formalists say we must turn to a close reading of the text, to see if the allusion is sensible.
In this case, it is not, as Eliot’s mermaids are romantic and Donne’s are strange. But it is very easy to see
how this method could prove inconclusive in many situations. Essentially, close readings and allusions can
be confused without considering historical context. It is also worthy of note that if an author intended
something it doesn’t follow that he succeeded, and therefore it is arguably false that the meaning of a text
is exactly what the author intended. If the intention succeeded, it was done by design, but if the intention
failed it may be important to understand what the author was trying to do. For example, in The Idiot,
Dostoevsky apparently intended to produce the portrait of a perfectly good man with Prince Myshkin, but
his failure to do so must be understood by the reader in order to be able to appreciate the text.

To conclude, after considering theories which range in where they place the determinate of the
text’s meaning, we find that each of the basic theories are flawed. Intentionalism limits the reader in their
understanding of the text’s scope, while constructivism allows too broad a range of interpretations. The
middle ground, formalism, whilst being too contextually alienated to provide deep insight into a work,
seems to be the least flawed theory. As we can never know the author’s real intentions, and we also cannot
solely depend on each reader’s personal interpretation, we must logically choose to find the meaning of the
text within the text itself, and its form. After all, if the author’s intentions were successful, the text will
convey them; and if the reader’s interpretations come from the text, they will also be carried within its
words, and so, formalism is the compromise of the two extremes.

5
Bibliography

Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Neil, Alex and Aaron Ridley. The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, McGraw Hill
Company, 2005
Leitch, Vincent (general editor). The Norton Anthology for Theory and Criticism, W. W. Norton &
Company Inc, 2001
Keegan, Paul (editor). The New Penguin Book of English Verse, Penguin Books, 2001
Gaut Berys, and Dominic McIver Lopes (editors). The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Routeledge,
2003