Talk:Authorial intent

Opening heading

This article, as it stands, is not an encyclopedia article. It's more of a deconstructionist tract.

By which, I presume you mean that it makes no gosh-darn sense? Anville 10:08, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

It is flatulent and pretentious. Esedowns (talk) 22:00, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

A more in-depth discussion of Wimsatt and Beardsley is warranted (I wish I was more qualified to carry it out)... in particular, it's important to acknowledge the historical modes of criticism they were reacting against. Another important note: Wimsatt and Beardsley, two of the leading critics of intentionality in interpretation, don't say it's "irrelevant" or "useless," as the article suggests. The intentionality debate, as they frame it, asks: "Should authorial intent be the authoritative interpretation of a text?" W & B's answer is, "No, authorial intent should just be one of a number of valid interpretations." i don't care what you say all i need is the definition —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.2.209.246 (talk) 23:34, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 07:03, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

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Authorial intentionality → Authorial intent — Both terms are used, but "authorial intent" is far more common. [1] [2] Recury (talk) 19:58, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

• Support per nom. Also, I've never seen the word "intentionality" before, but it is awful. Propaniac (talk) 20:14, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

citations needed

The sentence beginning: "The unfortunate side effect is that this view strips the artist of all value; it implies that only the product of their creation is of any importance" does not appear in the source, and it would not -- since it is a critique of the source. The source of the critique is needed in this article. It appears to be an editor adding their own ideas or opinions. There are other places where citations are requested -- where content is not supported by the only source listed. Alfadoolittle (talk) 15:45, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Also the suggestion that Wimsatt and Beardsley's "analysis can be applied equally well to any type of art" -- does not occur in Wimsatt and Beardsley, so it needs a source that is not Wimsatt and Beardsley. Alfadoolittle (talk) 15:48, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

My edit was to restore material deleted by a previous editor who had done a WP:Tag Bombing of the article. You can help by rewriting the portions which have been re-edited too many times. MusicAngels (talk) 14:37, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Right now the article has one and only one source -- which is a problem in and of itself. Also because there are ideas in the article that come from somewhere besides that particular source. A "citation tag" will encourage editors to help improve the article. Improving sourcing makes a better article and helps protect what's there. It shouldn't be hard to find other sources, it's a good topic and a lot has been written on it. Alfadoolittle (talk) 23:30, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

The citations about Beardsley are fairly well known, starting with The Intentionalist Fallacy used in this article, and extending to The Affective Fallacy as well as his dozen other books. This article stub is presently written from the perspective of the first reference about intentionality, and in the article's current form all the citations tags of the article, in its form at this time, are answered by that reference. MusicAngels (talk) 15:35, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

This article indicates only one source, and that single source is a relatively short article that has appeared in the periodical publication “The Sewanee Review”. That’s not enough. Also, there are ideas contained in this Wikipedia article that clearly do not occur in the source, so the question is: Where did these statements come from? If there is no published source for them, they perhaps are the invention of some Wiki editor, and should not be in the article. For example here is a phrase not found in the source: “although their analysis can be applied equally well to any type of art”. Where did it come from? Here is another example that needs a citation for the same reason: “One possible side effect is that this view appears to abridge the artist's intentions of much of their content; it appears to imply that only the product of their creation is the main object of any importance.” There are more. Articles need more than one source, more sources will improve the article. Additional sources for this topic should not be hard to find. Citation tags will help encourage the aquiring of appropriate sources. Alfadoolittle (talk) 04:20, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

The main source for Beardsley is in his book titled "Aesthetics", in which he provides the supplementary material for The Intentionalist Fallacy. For example, Beardsley was generally consistent in defending his position that aesthetic theory should extend across the sub-disciplines of the arts ranging from the literary arts to the visual arts, among the other subdisciplines as well. The second comment you make regarding "to abridge the artist's intentions" is a recurrent theme in the anti-formalist debates of the 1960s and 1970s where Beardsley sided against excessive antiformalism where the artist's intentions were given heightened regard. His essay "The Intentionalist Fallacy" does cover these concerns in either shorter or longer form, though there is no reason that his Aesthetics book cannot be added to supplement the essay as the main source. You can improve Wikipedia by rewriting these lines which are currently tagged in the article. MusicAngels (talk) 15:48, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Wimsatt and Beardsley's arguments in "The Intentional Fallacy" were not represented correctly in this entry. As previous commentators have noted, it included claims not present in that seminal essay. I removed all of the obvious inaccuracies (including the inaccurate claim that Wimsatt and Beardsley's position is connected to postmodern relativism). I don't pretend to have fixed the entry, though, and agree that more than one source is needed. Wimsatt and Beardsley's essay is only one of several famous arguments by New Critics, and their argument ideally should not be the only one presented in the entry. Jk180 (talk) 17:58, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Opening definition

" authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in his or her work." Anybody else find that totally useless? It's pretty much circular. --Khajidha (talk) 17:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Authorial intent in textual criticism

Textual criticism is the business of establishing what the author wrote. The author's intent is therefore all-important. To give an example, one of Horace's odes starts with either the word "poscimus" or its passive "poscimur". All that matters is, what did Horace intend to write? That is what needs to be said about authorial intent in textual criticism. Esedowns (talk) 22:34, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

Kinds of intentionalism

I have redirected both Hypothetical intentionalism and Actual intentionalism to Terry Barrett § Meanings of artworks are not always what the artist intended them to mean, since that article currently has the best discussion of these terms. However, content in that article should be merged into this one and the redirects changed when the situation improves. Daask (talk) 17:33, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I would also note that there is further content at E. D. Hirsch § UVA and Hermeneutics that may be helpful on this topic. Daask (talk) 17:45, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I've updated the page a bunch, it should be at least tolerably good enough now. So I'm going to change the redirects back. Maltonpsmith (talk) 22:10, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Overhauling article

I restructured the article and made a few other small edits, but I want to note that this probably needs a more thorough overhaul. As it stands, it spends much more time critiquing internationalism than actually explaining what it is. This article may be helpful for such.

ED Hirsch's article (and works in general) will likely be helpful; in my (admittedly somewhat limited) understanding of literary theory he is one of the chief proponents/expositors of authorial intent in hermeneutics. Maltonpsmith (talk) 16:49, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Ok, I decided to do as much as I could myself. I've pretty substantially overhauled the article. The new "Types" section is now tolerably accurate and good in my estimation. The "Objections" section is fine, if maybe a bit short. Unfortunately, while I have a working knowledge of intentionalism, my expertise is much more limited for anti-intentionalist approaches. Thus for the "Alternatives" section, I couldn't do much. I removed some of the less important alternatives to help tighten/focus it, but beyond a few small edits, I'm not qualified to figure out how best to clean those parts up; the post-structuralism section especially needs help. Oh, and I did add the hypothetical intentionalism section, based mostly on the single citation I gave, and copying over from the Terry Barrett wiki article.

Maltonpsmith (talk) 21:52, 8 May 2024 (UTC)