On Reading: The Intentional Fallacy (pt. 1)

Have you ever heard or seen people complain about how in English class teachers talk about what the author meant when they wrote “the curtains were blue”?

This image has been reposted so many times I can’t find the original. If you see it let me know so I can link back. Also I hate this image lmao

Good news: everyone’s right! (Or you’re both wrong, depending on how you look at it!)

Let me introduce you to a thing called The Intentional Fallacy AKA authorial intent.

What It Is

A fallacy is a mistaken belief or a fault in reasoning. The intentional fallacy basically states that whatever intention the author or creator of a piece of work had while creating doesn’t matter to what the work truly means.

The Intentional Fallacy essay claims that everything you need to analyze and understand a work is within the work itself. It places an emphasis on reader response over author intent because “the poem belongs to the public.”

History and Impact

The essay Intentional Fallacy was written in 1946 and revised in 1954 by WK Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. It was a response to Intentionalists, who believed that you needed to discover the intent of the creator. The essay mainly talks about poets, but I personally believe that these theories are applicable to all arts.

Previously, analysists and critics would consult religious, historical, bibliographical, etc. texts to assist in trying to discover the point of a work. This essay was important to New Criticism, which used only the work to interpret the work with no outside knowledge or influence.

Obviously, it’s impossible to look at a work without these outside influences if you already know them so nowadays we use all of these to interpret and analyze work, giving us different lenses of criticisms to look through. New Criticism is why you absolutely must use textual evidence in your papers.

Why It’s Important

The essay states:

“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.”

And

“If the poet succeeded in doing it then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem…”

That is to say, execution of intent does not equal success.

So it’s impossible for us as consumers of media to know exactly what the intent was. Intentional Fallacy and New Criticism has given us a new way to look at art without judging whether it was successful or not.

It’s important to know that there are different ways to look at, analyze, and interpret a work, but you can still be wrong about it. Authorial intent still plays a large part in analysis today, but psychoanalytic criticism argues that sometimes there’s an unconscious intent that even the creator is unaware of.

Intent isn’t the only way to measure or analyze a poem.

The reason I wanted to talk about this was so that I could next talk about the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. It’s a famous poem that’s been reduced to what did he mean? What does the wheelbarrow symbolize? And there’s a lot more to it than that. So stay tuned to see how authorial intent is actually applied in literary analysis and criticisms!

Sources: Intentional Fallacy PDF