Philosophy and Literature

Abstract:

For seven decades, professors of literature have considered referral to an author's intentions to be theoretically out of bounds, while in practice they do it all the time. I suggest that one reason for this undesirable gap between theory and practice is that, for literary scholars, the notion of intention itself is poorly understood. Authorial intention is thought of as single, simple, rationally generated, and preexisting in the author's mind rather than the multiple, complex, and process-based phenomenon that it is. In this essay I provide a bottom-up account of intention with the aim of dispelling this misunderstanding.