ITTOL - Lecture 5 - Wimsatt, Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy

William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, in The Intentional Fallacy, (The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition, David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 811-18), describe seeking for the author's intention as akin to "consulting the oracle". For them, the "...true and objective way of [literary] criticism..."(818) is to ask "...whether it [your interpretation] makes sense" given the text itself.
They are primarily concerned with the judgment of a text; is it a success or not?

... the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art... (811)

And describe author intention as "...[the] design or plan in the author's mind...the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write." (811). They deny that one can objectively know any of this or, even if one did know the author's intention, that it could be used as a standard for judging the success of his work; they list five axioms in their support:

1. Acknowledgement that a poem is the creation of a "designing intellect" does not automatically make the author's intention a standard for measuring the success of his work
   
2. If the author fails in his intention "... the poem is not adequate evidence..." (811) i.e. you can't devolve the author's intention from a work that was not what he intended as you would have no way of knowing, from the work, that the work was not what he intended
   
3. We can only know a poem from what it is "A poem can 'be' only through its meaning ..." (811)
   
4. If we are to impute intention, it should be to the reader and not the author. "We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference." (811)
   
5. A work often goes through many revisions before it is completed; what the author intended when he sat down to start the text may not be what he intended by the time he finished the text
   

And while axiom four implies the speaker's intentions are more important than the author's, in reality neither are

The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.) (812)

Like Gadamer and Iser, for them, the literary text is "what it is"; a separate and unique object to be judged on its own. Unlike Gadamer and Iser, they do not impute a third object resulting from the act of reading. They admit to three types of evidence that can be used when trying to arrive at meaning:

1. Internal and public - syntax and semantics; the language itself and
   "... all that makes a language and culture what it is." (814).
   
2. External and private - journals, letters, notes made by the author as well as author conversations (interviews). These are essentially the author's private thoughts which, at some point, become available to readers and critics
   
3. Intermediate evidence - the author's history with regards to specific words; "the associations which the word[s] had for him." (814). How he used particular words in his work; approached various themes.

Evidence of type 2 and 3 subtly "shade into" each other and are not easily separated leaving evidence of type 1 as affording the best opportunity for arriving at the meaning of the text. The reader must ask whether the meanings they settle on (their interpretation) make sense in the context of the text itself.