Abstract
In today's literary theory there is a consensus regarding the concept of authorial intention, namely, that it is obsolete and useless for the interpretation of literary texts and has relevance only in such discourses as legal discourse or literary history. The aim of my paper is to reinterpret the concept of authorial intent from the aspect of Darwinian and cognitive theory. I will argue that the authorial intention is not a fallacy that necessarily results in misinterpretations of the text, but a way of reading narrative according to its fictional status. I will demonstrate on some examples that the strongest stimuli for making assumptions about the authorial intention are passages that do not allow the reader to follow any intradiegetic perspective but force a global view on the fictional work.
About the author
Márta Horváth (b. 1969) is an associate professor at University of Szeged 〈horvathmarta8@gmail.com〉. Her research interests include cognitive poetics, Darwinian literary theory, and narratology. Her publications include “Der Alte und der Greis. Rationalitätskritik in Daniel Kehlmanns Die Vermessung der Welt” [The old and the aged. The critique of rationality in Daniel Kehlmann's novel Die Vermessung der Welt] (2009); “Új interdiszciplinaritás. A biológiai irodalom- és kultúraelmélet német változatai” [New interdisciplinarity. Darwinian literary and cultural studies in Germany] (2010); “ ‘Megtestesült olvasás’ – A kognitív narratológia empirikus alapjai” [“Embodied reading” – The empirical foundations of cognitive narratology] (2011); and “Az olvasás eredete. Evolúcióelméleti érvelés a kognitív poétikában” [The orignins of reading. Evolutionary argumentation in cognitive poetics] (2012).
©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
