Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

It's not a question of agreeing with the author's intent. There are three problems with authorial intent as a means of analyzing literature.

The first is that it's unknowable. One can attempt to analyze the author, the author's historical period, or some other context by examining all the materials at hand: the text, the author's writings about the text,other historical materials, etc. But a scholar cannot know the author's intent and purpose. The examples I give above are specifically examples chosen to show how an author's stated description of their own intent and purpose changes over time, or in different contexts, or as expressly contradicted by the text or other writings and speeches of the author.

Believing one can actually discern the author's purpose often leads students to believe that anything they see in the text which might be interesting could only possibly be there because the author thought of it. Moreover, it leads them to believe that interpretations which couldn't possibly have been by authorial intent (because of historical context, for example) are automatically invalid. Moreover, it makes it even harder for students to navigate their way out of the perennial confusion between stance of the text, stance of the narrator, and stance of the protagonist; three positions which in many texts are distinct. Throwing some imagined "stance of the author" into that mix merely increases the difficulty.

Secondly, it's no more impossible to analyze the text without authorial intent then it is impossible to analyze the building without knowing architect's intent. The building, like the text, stands on its own.

Moreover, while in the purely pragmatic and Marxist theory senses a text is the product of the author's mind (if you oversimplify the role of editor, publisher, book designer, etc. on the resulting text), the experience of reading it is not. I suppose I find pure textual analysis and reader response theory less mutually exclusive than some critics, and perforce, following critics from Louise Rosenblatt to Stanley Fish, I choose to value a reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of every text.

Finally, I don't teach my students to understand the purpose of the text, but the effect of it. Again, I'm teaching literary analysis, not cultural studies. In that context, what we are analyzing is the text in hand. It's not the text's purpose that matters, but the text itself: how it works interaction with the readers; how the text operates metafictionally in conversation with itself, other texts, and larger culture; etc.

Coming back to the example of the house, what does it matter if the architect's purpose, or even the house's purpose, is that this room be a bedroom? If all people who live in the house believe that this room is a study, then it's a study.