Defining Intentional Fallacy
The intentional fallacy is the mistaken belief that an author's intended meaning should be the standard for interpreting or judging a literary work. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that a text's meaning should come from the text itself, not from external sources like the author's biography, interviews, or stated goals. This idea places the literary work at the center of analysis and gives the reader a genuine role in constructing meaning.
The concept became one of the foundational principles of New Criticism, and its influence extends well beyond that movement into reader-response theory and poststructuralism.
Origins of Intentional Fallacy
Wimsatt and Beardsley's Essay
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley coined the term in their 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy." Their central claim was direct: the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.
Before this essay, biographical criticism dominated literary studies. Critics routinely turned to an author's letters, diaries, and life circumstances to explain what a poem or novel "really meant." Wimsatt and Beardsley pushed back against this practice, arguing that it confused the origins of a work with its meaning. Their essay helped lay the groundwork for New Criticism's emphasis on close reading and textual analysis.
Key Arguments of the Intentional Fallacy
Text vs. Author's Intention
- Once a work is published, it exists independently. The text becomes the primary source of meaning, not whatever the author hoped to communicate.
- The author's intention is often unknowable in any reliable way. Even when authors explain their own work, those explanations are just another text, not a master key.
- Wimsatt and Beardsley distinguished between three types of evidence for meaning: internal (what's in the text), external (author's stated intentions, biography), and contextual (public knowledge of language and conventions). They argued that only internal and contextual evidence are legitimate for interpretation.
Reader's Interpretation vs. Author's Meaning
Each reader brings different knowledge, experiences, and perspectives to a text. This means multiple valid interpretations can coexist without any of them needing to match what the author "meant."
The reader's construction of meaning matters more, in this framework, than recovering the author's original message. Umberto Eco later developed a related idea with his concept of the "open work": literary texts are inherently open to a range of interpretations that the reader activates through engagement with the text.
Implications for Literary Criticism
New Criticism and Close Reading
Intentional fallacy is a cornerstone of New Criticism. New Critics held that the text contains everything necessary for interpretation. You don't need the author's diary or a biography to understand a poem.
Close reading is the method that follows from this principle. It involves careful attention to a text's formal elements:
- Structure: How the work is organized, its patterns and breaks
- Language: Word choice, syntax, tone, ambiguity
- Imagery and figurative language: Metaphors, symbols, allusions
The goal is to let meaning emerge from these elements rather than importing it from outside the text.
The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes extended the logic of intentional fallacy in his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author." Barthes argued that the author's identity and intentions are irrelevant to interpretation. Once a text is written, it belongs to its readers.
Barthes framed this as a transfer of authority: the "death" of the author is simultaneously the "birth of the reader." Where Wimsatt and Beardsley were primarily concerned with critical method, Barthes made a broader philosophical claim about how meaning works in language itself.
Defenses of Authorial Intent
Not everyone accepted the intentional fallacy. Two main positions push back against it:
Moderate Intentionalism
Moderate intentionalists argue that while the text is the primary source of meaning, the author's intentions can still provide valuable context. This position seeks a balance: use close reading as your foundation, but don't ignore authorial intent when it's clearly documented and helps resolve genuine ambiguities.
For example, knowing the historical and cultural moment an author was writing in can clarify references that would otherwise be opaque. The key distinction is that intent supplements textual analysis rather than overriding it.
Extreme Intentionalism
This is the minority view that the author's intention is the ultimate determinant of meaning. The goal of interpretation, on this account, is to recover what the author meant to convey. Critics of this position point out that it undermines the text's autonomy and ignores the reader's role entirely. It also runs into a practical problem: how do you verify what someone "really" intended?
Reconciling Author and Reader
Eco's Open Work
Umberto Eco's concept of the "open work" offers a middle path. Eco proposed that authors create works containing a range of potential meanings. These meanings aren't infinite or arbitrary; the text constrains them. But within those constraints, readers actualize different interpretations through their own engagement.
This framework preserves the text's openness without abandoning the idea that some readings are better supported than others.
The Dialectic Between Intention and Interpretation
Some critics propose that meaning emerges from the interplay between the author's design and the reader's response. This approach acknowledges that authors make deliberate choices (about form, imagery, structure) while recognizing that those choices produce effects the author may not have fully anticipated. The text becomes a meeting point rather than a one-way transmission.
Intentional Fallacy in Practice
Analyzing Poetry and Prose
When you apply the intentional fallacy, you set aside what the author said about the work and focus on what the work itself does.
Consider T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot provided his own notes and made various public statements about the poem. But a New Critical reading would focus on the poem's fragmented structure, its dense web of allusions (to myth, religion, other literary works), and its shifts in voice and register. These formal features generate meaning on their own, regardless of what Eliot personally intended.
Applying to Other Art Forms
The intentional fallacy has been extended beyond literature to visual art, film, and music. In each case, the principle is the same: the work itself is the primary source of meaning.
Jackson Pollock's drip paintings are a useful example. Viewers interpret them through their responses to the visual elements (movement, color, scale, texture) rather than relying on Pollock's explanations of his process. The painting stands as its own object of interpretation.
Ongoing Debates and Controversies
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Poststructuralist thinkers, especially Jacques Derrida, pushed the implications of intentional fallacy even further. Deconstruction emphasizes the inherent instability of language: words don't have fixed meanings, and meaning is always deferred through chains of signification. From this perspective, the author's intentions are not just unavailable but fundamentally impossible to pin down, because language itself resists stable meaning.
Poststructuralists argue that texts contain multiple, often contradictory meanings that no single interpretation (including the author's own) can fully resolve.
The Continuing Value of Biographical Criticism
Despite the influence of intentional fallacy, biographical criticism hasn't disappeared. Some scholars maintain that understanding an author's life and context genuinely enriches interpretation.
Knowing about Virginia Woolf's struggles with mental illness, for instance, can deepen a reading of the themes of isolation, fragmented consciousness, and inner turmoil in Mrs. Dalloway. The question isn't whether such knowledge is interesting, but whether it should determine interpretation or simply inform it. That distinction remains at the heart of the debate.