Intentional fallacy
From Free net encyclopedia
Intentional fallacy is a literary term that asserts that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is not the only, and perhaps not the most important, meaning of the piece. The term was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay The Intentional Fallacy. The notion of author's intention has become central to modern literary criticism, and the explanation of intentional fallacy is an important part of what is known as the New Criticism. Thus this term means "a fallacy about intention" and not "committing a fallacy on purpose". Their view is similar to the one made famous by Roland Barthes in his essay The Death of the Author.
When writing, an author must call upon both his understanding of the language in which he writes and his personal experiences about reality to create a work. Even the most escapist fantasy must appeal to some shared understanding in the reader to be intelligible at all. A reader must also call upon his understanding of language and personal experiences in order to decode meaning in a work.
A literary work may thus be looked at as an attempt by an author to communicate to a reader via a shared language and shared experiences with the reader. Without a common ground, communication is laboured or impossible.
There will always be some differences between author and reader, however. The author and the reader will inevitably have had different personal experiences, and therefore hold different beliefs and opinions about what different aspects of reality mean, and their relative importances. Because of these differences, the meaning taken by a reader can only approximate the meaning intended by the author, and also can only approximate the meaning taken by other readers.
Further complicating communication is that both the author and the reader may be unaware of peculiarities in their understanding of reality, and these peculiarities may colour either the work as written or the meaning taken by the reader in ways unconscious to either.
For example, a work written during the immediate Post-World War II era may exhibit commonly-held views of the time, such as prejudices concerning Germans or Japanese. A modern reader might disagree with these prejudices, and see newfound meaning in reviewing how these prejudices color the work. This becomes especially clear when considering works written hundreds of years earlier, or in a radically different culture: how is one to know what a Medieval writer truly meant to say in a poem? If Medieval literature still has value today, it is at least partially because of how we understand it to produce meaning, not by virtue of what the author meant to say.
Modern literary critics argue that this new found meaning is not merely a curious quirk, but an equally legitimate interpretation of the work.
External links
- Deconstruction - Asserts that even if the author states intentions for the meaning of a work, that meaning is not privileged above other interpretations.gl:Falacia intencional