The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0615 Monday, 17 September 2007
[1] From: John Drakakis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 13:47:24 +0100
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0588 Authorial Intention
[2] From: John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 14:20:12 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[3] From: Marilyn A. Bonomi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 09:50:06 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[4] From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 10:37:22 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[5] From: Will Sharpe <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 16:53:05 +0100
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[6] From: Sally Drumm <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 12:22:20 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[7] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 15:02:04 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[8] From: Hugh Grady <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 15 Sep 2007 16:34:44 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[9] From: Joseph Egert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 16 Sep 2007 13:44:45 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
[10] From: David Schalkwyk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, 17 Sep 2007 12:56:11 +0200
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0598 Authorial Intention
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Drakakis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 13:47:24 +0100
Subject: 18.0588 Authorial Intention
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0588 Authorial Intention
Larry Weiss obviously has a hotline to the writer's mind. I don't and
I'm very chary about speculating. I doesn't stop me from occasionally
trying to guess but I know that I am only working from a particular
configuration of written words. If Shakespeare were here, and if I asked
him what he intended by, say, Coriolanus, or Timon of Athens, would I
have to believe what he said, and what tools would I use to verify by
findings? And would those tools help me to locate 'objectively' (as Joe
Egert might say) Shakespeare's mind, OR would they tell you more about
how I thought the human mind worked? The first claim is futile, and the
second is presentist.
You pays yer money and you takes your choice.
Best wishes
John Drakakis
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 14:20:12 +0100
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Larry Weiss wrote:
>(1) If we can agree (as Hugh Grady and Will Sharpe seem to) that words
>are not inherently meaningless and that authors have expectations in
>mind when they compose their works,
But that's the point - there is no problem discussing authors'
"expectations", problems only arise when they are elevated to "intentions".
John Briggs
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Marilyn A. Bonomi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 09:50:06 -0400
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Cary DiPietro cites a college text:
>"An implied author is that sensibility (that combination of feeling,
>intelligence, knowledge, and opinion) that 'accounts for' the narrative.
>"It accounts for the narrative in the sense that the implied authorial
views
>that we find emerging in the narrative *are consistent with all the
elements
>of the narrative discourse that we are aware of*."
40 years ago I was teaching 15 year olds the concept of "narrative
voice", using a sketch on the board where an author (clad in beret with
feather and leaning over a desk) crafted a document from which emerged a
bubble with a mouth on one side. from the mouth emerged the text.
The 15 year olds did seem to grasp that the voice which tells the tale
is *not* the voice of the author. And they also grasped that the
narrative voice might utter things that were appalling to the *author*
but which suited the *narrative voice* that was telling the tale.
>From there we went to the Unreliable Narrator, and so to
>making meanings (note plural there) from text.
Perhaps the first lesson of good teaching to me was that I cannot hand
meaning to the students; learners must learn to make meaning and defend
that meaning with text and all the concomitants to text.
Thus, when Huck Finn casually tosses out to Aunt Sally (re the purported
steamboat accident) "no'm; killed a n*r though" we see that as *Huck's*
world view, not necessarily Twain's.
And when the Chorus in R&J calls the lovers "star crossed" or Romeo
cries "O I am Fortune's fool!" we know that we need to separate the text
from William Shakespeare-we cannot simplistically ascribe a believe in
fate as the controlling force to Shakespeare. We need to see those
statements against the action of the play.
We do not know William Shakespeare. We have limited evidence about his
life, and none about his thoughts and/or intentions, since he left us no
memoirs.
Even had he (or Anne Hathaway, or some old friend in Stratford) left
voluminous memoirs we still would be dealing with a deliberate authorial
"voice" and not directly with the man.
We can make informed guesses about Shakespeare and informed
interpretations (informed by any number of things) but I do not see how
anyone (possibly even Shakespeare himself) can know all the "meanings"
that Shakespeare *intended* in his plays and poems. How hubristic of us
to assume that we can!
Ed Taft mentions the sense of surety about "the" meaning of ancient
Greek works. He made me think of the response each year to the Zoe
Caldwell video of Medea that we used with the senior Humanities class
(history/English team-taught "history of Western civ" elective). Even
with having studied (albeit in a limited way) the culture and mores of
the ancient Greek city-states, students were bemused. They found more
meaning in that work than "the one" that evidently drove its composition.
Mari Bonomi
[4]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 10:37:22 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
I'd like to play "devil's advocate" in response to the penultimate
paragraph of Ed Taft's interesting post, below:
>Do we have a problem with interpreting "The Wife's Lament" or "The
>Wanderer," or with Homer's intention in his epics? Isn't the answer
>"No"? This leads me to think that, maybe, when the values in an area of
>study are firmly believed to be dead - of historic importance only - we
>can pretty much agree about interpretation and intention. But when the
>values in an era touch us personally, as in Shakespeare and the
>Renaissance generally, then the fight begins.
In fact, we *do* have (at least) one problem with "intentionality" in
Homer, which focuses on the final scenes of the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. Generally recognized as encomia to the victors of the Trojan
War, the first text portrays Achilles as a very un-gracious winner,
barbarously dragging Hector's body through the dirt to disgrace his
corpse, and refusing to allow Priam to bury him to prevent the safe
passage of his shade across the Styx. But then the great warrior
relents, seeing the same father's tears that would have been shed, had
the body behind the chariot wheels belonged to him. Does that final
scene subvert the "death in war is the greatest glory" message of the
rest of the epic? and if so, does it do so "intentionally"?
(I won't ask if an author who did not write what he "wrote" is capable
of "intention.")
At the end of the Odyssey, the great warrior is told to journey inland
until he finds a community that has never seen an oar (i.e. never gone
to sea in battle), and there make his home--but only after he has
savagely ambushed and slaughtered Penelope's suitors in his own mansion.
Why is Homer suggesting that this martial hero become a farmer, and
leave the battlefield forever, if death in battle is such a wonderful
thing?
And so on.
It seems to me that the abiding value of great literature is precisely
that it has different valences, and offers different "lenses" to a
variety of readers through which they can all (if they are reading and
interpreting responsibly) come to the same "truth." It is ridiculous, I
think, to say that a writer has no "intention" when he or she composes
something (even an e-mail)--to say that we can always and infallibly
determine what that intention is, is misguided too. But certainly, at
least one "intention" of which I was conscious when I wrote this was to
point out that even Homer (and Virgil, too) can be read as allegorical
on some plane. Did they "intend" to subvert their own themes? Or did
they simply write more than they knew?
Most authors will tell you that, at some point, their characters take on
lives of their own--and that when that occurs, they (the characters)
dictate the progress of the plot, no matter what the author had
originally planned to do.
I think we can all agree that Shakespeare "meant" *something*. Trying to
determine what when he gives us so many ambiguities to sort out is part
of the fun!
Best to all,
Carol Barton
[5]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Will Sharpe <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 16:53:05 +0100
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
From Larry Weiss:
>(1) If we can agree (as Hugh Grady and Will Sharpe seem to)
>that words are not inherently meaningless and that authors
>have expectations in mind when they compose their works,
>can we also say that the issue is not whether it is "futile" to
>attempt to discern any of the content which the author expected
>us to give to the text, but whether we can confidently derive the
>precise reactions he or she intended the audience to have to all
>of the text?
No. The author doesn't 'expect' us to bring whatever it is we will bring
to a text. S/he can't manage individual responses to what they've
written. Even if we reduce it to the ridiculously simplistic notion of
'the meaning of all of the text', you'll still get different reactions.
I might think the the author of The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic
(I don't, by the way), and you might think that that's ludicrous, but
which of us is right? It says more about you and me and our own
interpretations than it does about the author. Apropos of Cary di
Pietro's reply, I do think you need to do more reading around theories
of narratology. These are not just the ideas of certain of our
listmembers, but deeply entrenched features of contemporary literary
theory, discussed voluminously over the last 40 years.
Best,
Will Sharpe
[6]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sally Drumm <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 12:22:20 -0400
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
My response is to Mr. Taft's and Mr. Weiss's questions:
From: Edmund Taft
>1. .".. do we have the same difficulties ascertaining authorial intention
>with ancient literature? The Greeks and the Romans, or, say, Old English
>poetry?"
Yes: Consider the work of ancient Hebrew scribes and the question of
their intentions in composing the Old Testament. Or consider the
intention of Mohammed and the result of interpretation of authorial
intention of his work.
>2. "Do we have a problem with interpreting 'The Wife's Lament' or "The
>Wanderer," or with Homer's intention in his epics? Isn't the answer
'No'?"
>Quite the contrary. Why did Chaucer write The Canterbery Tales? Was it to
>entertain his audience, to inform his audience about the lives of
others, to
>persuade his audience of the veracity of a certain morality? What was
>Chaucer's intention? As for Homer, isn't there still a question of Homer1s
>identity and isn1t interpreting intention one of the marker's used to
>determine authorial authenticity, also a Shakespearian question of the
same
>nature?
>
>3. Paraphrase: ["This leads me to think that, maybe, when the values in an
>area of study are firmly believed to be dead - of historic importance
only -
>we can pretty much agree about interpretation and intention. But when the
>values in an era touch us personally, as in Shakespeare and the
Renaissance
>generally, then the fight begins."] Is historical criticism less
>interpretative, and therefore less subjective, than other critical
theories?
My response is no, only its practices, assumptions, and questions, are
different from other critical methods of inquiry. There is a larger
question here. Cultural values change and die, but are historical values
eternal in so much as the past cannot be changed?
From: Larry Weiss
>(1) "If we can agree (as Hugh Grady and Will Sharpe seem to) that words
>are not inherently meaningless and that authors have expectations in
>mind when they compose their works, can we also say that the issue is
>not whether it is "futile" to attempt to discern any of the content
>which the author expected us to give to the text, but whether we can
>confidently derive the precise reactions he or she intended the audience
>to have to all of the text?"
Okay we can explore those intentions for audience reaction based on
diary, journal, and first had accounts of the author1s reaction to a
work's reception. Do we have that for any of Shakespeare's works?
Perhaps the question we're really blindly poking is the question of
determining Shakespeare's authorial intention. If that's the case let me
flaunt just one layer of the onion. If intent can be interpreted by
action, can we interpret Shakespeare's act of leaving so little of the
personal behind, drafts, etc. as a statement of authorial intention as
antithesis?
>2) "If so [if the answer to #1 is yes], is the appropriate critical
response
>to this difficulty to declare defeat and make no attempt to derive the
>author's likely expectations, or, on the other hand, to study all relevant
>determinants -- philological, cultural, historical, biographical,
literary,
>etc. -- and attempt to come as close as possible to the likely intended
>meaning?
We would first have to define the basic approaches of literary criticism
(I think it is the boundaries of literary criticism that we are
exploring in this fascinating thread.), their assumptions, practices,
and questions. Then we could begin an interdisciplinary inquiry into
authorial intention, basing questions of text-based intention strictly
upon the methodology of the various approaches. In beginning this work
by determining the approaches we would work with, we would discover that
some of the valid critical approaches do not care in the least about
authorial intention. That being the case we can whittle down the stick
with which we'll beat our drum. A basic glance at a least of approaches
tells me that the only approaches that can be used to holistically
address authorial intention are Historical, Postcolonial, and Cultural
Studies, Psychological Criticism, (perhaps) Feminist Criticism, and
Post-Feminism and Queer theory. New Criticism, Reader-Response
Criticism, and Deconstructive Criticism are not generally assumed to be
concerned with authorial intention. If it is the case that we might
narrow our choices and lighten our workload by first defining and
categorizing our questions, then that list of questions to ask of the
text are delimitated by our choice of approaches from which to make our
inquiry. For someone who might not have invested in writing from the
point of view of a single approach, the synthesis of an
interdisciplinary inquiry using questions and practices from approaches
designed to explore authorial intention might actually paint a portrait
of authorial intention. However, that portrait will always remain, at
the end of the day, interpretative rather than deterministic.
[7]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 14 Sep 2007 15:02:04 -0400
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Perhaps we can refine the question a little more by reference to the
points made by the two Carys. Cary Dean Barney says that there is a
difference between intention and meaning. I agree, which is why I
prefer to use the word "expectations," which carries less negative
freight than "intention." If we take the distinction as being the
difference between what the author expected us to understand and what we
in fact do understand from the text, then the latter is equivalent to
Cary DiPietro's "implied [or inferred] author" and there is no need for
that construct.
[8]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hugh Grady <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 15 Sep 2007 16:34:44 -0400
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
In re Larry Weiss's question: If we can agree (as Hugh Grady and Will
Sharpe seem to) that words are not inherently meaningless and that
authors have expectations in mind when they compose their works, can we
also say that the issue is not whether it is "futile" to attempt to
discern any of the content which the author expected us to give to the
text, but whether we can confidently derive the precise reactions he or
she intended the audience to have to all of the text?
Has anyone anywhere ever thought that "words are...inherently
meaningless"? I don't think so, so our agreement on this point is not
earth-shaking!
And I don't know anyone who thinks authors don't have intentions toward
their works, though possibly at several levels in not necessarily
coherent ways. The problem is, how can we know them? All we can do is
make intelligent guesses. There are cases where authors have expressed
their intentions for works that the world has continued to ignore, and
for good reason. Ibsen famously claimed that "A Doll's House" had
nothing to do with women's rights, but was about the differences in
worldviews of men and women. It's hard to know how seriously to take
Ibsen's claim, but to my mind it is one that lessens the import of his
play and should be put aside.
Best,
Hugh Grady
[9]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joseph Egert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 16 Sep 2007 13:44:45 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0609 Authorial Intention
Once we subtract its "impurities", i.e., the long exploded Marxist
claptrap linking use-value and exchange-value through congealed labor,
John Drakakis' "Afterword" (in Andrew Murphy's new CONCISE COMPANION TO
SHAKESPEARE AND THE TEXT) nicely illuminates the issues contested here.
JD includes among his conundra whether the line "This Lodovico is a
proper man." belongs or should belong to Desdemona or Emilia.
Regrettably, John again avoids casting his own vote in the matter.
Perhaps he could do so here at SHAKSPER and add his rationale. Any
answer would be welcome, be it sought or unsought by your humble
correspondent.
Regards,
Joe Egert
[10]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Schalkwyk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, 17 Sep 2007 12:56:11 +0200
Subject: 18.0598 Authorial Intention
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0598 Authorial Intention
>When John Drakakis says that it is "futile" to attempt to discern what
>an author intended by his writings, just exactly what is he telling us?
>
>Principally, he is telling us that he is unschooled in formal
>skepticism, and that once more dear friends, he would strain every nerve
>in an effort to breathe life into the utterly dead French Ninny School
>of Literary Criticism and Theory. By his own writ he disproves his own
>writ, which disproves that which he has written about that which he
>writes: turtles all the way down.
>
>-- All the best, R.A. Cantrell
It may be useful to remember that the attack on "intentionalism"
preceded the "French Ninny School", or at least it developed without any
contact or contamination in schools of philosophy and literary criticism
in the USA and Europe. As far as I know, Wimsatt and Beardsley's
classic, "The Intentional Fallacy", published in 1946 and revised in
1954, owes nothing to Saussure, Barthes or Foucault. In fact,
"psychologism" (i.e. the belief that the meanings of utterances are
derivable or reducible to the state of mind of the user) has been a
major target within the analytical tradition of philosophy (a thoroughly
Anglo-American affair) since the work of its founding father, G. Frege,
in the nineteenth century--signally in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Hilary Putnam, the latter declaring in a seminal essay, entitled
"The Meaning of 'Meaning'": "Meaning just ain't in the head". One can
tell from the idiom that this is not a Frenchman writing, but a good
citizen of the USA.
In my view, much of the trouble with the debate lies in the ambiguous
use of the word "intention", which seems to be indispensable in any talk
about things that are produced by human beings, but cannot eradicate the
equally unavoidable work of interpretation. I thus agree with Hugh
Grady that it's a red herring. There's an interesting collection of
essays by intentionalists, anti-intentionalists and hybrid
middle-of-the-roaders edited by Gary Iseminger called Intention and
Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992) for those
interested in the argument within analytical philosophy.
David Schalkwyk
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the
opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the
editor assumes no responsibility for them.