Things plebs say:

>this

Obvious Pleb

This might be the dumbest thing I've read on this board

name one example of provably known authorial intent. where's your mind-reading device and does it work on dead people?

then you're a newfag and need to go away

high schooler detected

the koran

so not only do you believe in authorial intent, you are also bewildered that educated people don't? it's like you never even MET anyone who went to college

actually allah is shown to regularly deceive people in the quran (like when he fakes the crucifixion of christ) so even if the quran is revealed wisdom from allah it could still be trickery. intent uncertain.

>Things plebs say:

not even authors can know their intent as a singularity

So what the author says about their work is less important than what some rando says about it?

It's like if we were having a conversation, what I meant is more important than what you thought i meant. You would say "well I interpreted what you said as meaning this."
Books without intent are just Dada, high-school-tier pseud-bait, and people who think that what they take away from a book is more important than what the author intended are probably pseuds themselves

the reader's interpretation is even more worthless than authorial intent. literally neither matter. and before you whine that authorial intent matters, tell me why you read kafka despite his wishes otherwise? why read incomplete works? the art itself as an objective edifice is the thing in itself. it needs no interpretation or intent to exist.

you're being silly. what you say about a work can still be judged by how closely it fits the textual evidence. things like interviews with the author can also be treated as evidence, but of a secondary importance to the text itself. if you want to talk about critical theory you need to invest at least a bit of effort into learning what it entails because you're complaining about this imaginary internet myth in which death of the author means i can say the illiad is about pink elephants and you can't prove me wrong. that's not how it works.

I can see that, and I'm not saying that all interpretation is wrong, I only mean that authorial intent should be the first and final verdict on the meaning of a work

>If you don't like Marx, it means you don't understand him

>authorial intent should be the first and final verdict on the meaning of a work

wrong, the text is the final verdict

One of allah's 99 names he gave for himself was "Allah the Best Deceiver".

But the text wouldn't exist without the author, and every good author writes with purpose

>I dont care about the plot

Thats an antology you dipshit

neither of those things changes the text, outside of changes in language, the only thing that realy, truly tells you want the text is, is the text. If the author fails in his aim, the text can still provide a purpose.

>genre fiction
>any authorial intent
AI is getting dumber every day.

I like important philosophers I disagree with. You probably misunderstand his importance in philosophy.

You faggots, what you have to consider is not what the author tried to say nor what is "intrinsic within the text" but the context when the book was written.

that would be very nice if it wasn't for the fact that this authorial intent is not available to you in any way. shit a writer says in an interview is not revealed truth from a deity.

you need to understand that the importance of intent wasn't discarded out of some academic perversity, it faded away because investigating intent is a doomed pursuit. what is the intent of homer when we don't even know whether there was a homer? what's the intent of a writer that gives different answers in every interview? do you have perfectly coherent explanations for everything you did today? last month? ten years ago? how is an author supposed to know what he "truly meant" decades in the past? it's not just that he forgot, he never really knew even as he was writing. the mysteries of the egyptians were mysteries to the egyptians themselves.

it's like with history where you used to have this naive desire to just know "what really happened". we will NEVER know what really happened. the past is gone. all that's left is evidence and interpretation of evidence. same with literature, intent is simply not available so all you have left to talk about is the text itself.

>authorial intent
>importance of historical context

what a fucking shitshow. i'm taking my talents to reddit, this is unbearable

why the fuck you read book?
because of the author?

oh my god.

If the author says 2+2 = 5 that doesn't make that correct

t, too, went to university :D

maybe it's correct for him.
why you care

In fact even our own intent is unknowable to us and we can only make a guess about it trough reasoning.

You are mistaking "intent" for "what the authors thinks he was trying to say".

>user...

>the context when the book was written.

history is also just an interpretation of fragmentary evidence so all you're doing is pushing the problem further away. the song of roland was written by a dude at a certain time, we will get it once we understand the time in which the dude wrote. what's the context? this historical chronicle will give us the context, but wait that's another book written by a dude in a time. how do we understand the chronicle? well let's look at the song of roland...

to get out of this loop you will simply have to commit to a reading of the text at some point. there's nothing to fall back on. it's scary because freedom is scary.

Walter Benn Michaels has made an entire career out of defending authorial intent.

I don't know if it's more important, but it's at least as valuable as an author's intent, not that their intent is something you can usually know, and even if it was it probably still doesn't matter that much.

"Schemer" would be a more accurate translation than "deceiver"

I just left /b/ yet this thread has been the most repulsive thing I've seen all day

That's why you care about aesthetics.

wasps?

Is there anything wrong with my approach?

>read about the historical and cultural context in which the text was written
>read the text
>think independently about it
>look for the author's insights about the text
>using my first frame of reference (my initial intuitions) I reframe the text using the extra-literary informations given by the author, while trying to heuristically derive from both said informations and the original texts the nature of the idea and the logic of the work itself
>get to a new picture of the text, which is still as deep as the original one: although I might have long commentaries of the author about his own work, this will just mean that understanding his vision is just a new starting point, from which one can analyze independently the work of art with more awareness and foresight

>eventually read secondary literature
>compare my own conclusion with the ones of the scholars I'm reading

Is this fine? It looks pretty bullet proof to me.

>>intent of author is most important!
>teleports behind you
hheh.... nothing personnel, kid

your first step is infinitely recursive. the algorithm will never finish.

The first step refers to secondary literature, which I read (usually, depending on who is the author) casually.

then you are in effect reading secondary literature on the text before reading the text. any book on the historical context of homer is going to be a book on homer.

Ohhhh buddies.... sorry to hear you're having trouble with this. It's a nuanced mix of both dependent on both the text and the author. Yikes

Shakespeare.

guys don't both matter?

>if you're writing genre fiction, don't even bother

No. Everything must be black or white. You just refuse to see the OBJECTIVE TRUTH because you are stupid. REEE

>implying Russian Formalism is bad

Away with you, post-structuralist cuck.

as an user on /mu/ said:
>there is no patrician taste, only patrician listeners

If the author's intent matters so much, why don't they write down exactly what their intent was and publish that together with the actual story? Practically no author ever did that.

I'm reminded of an anecdote
>dumb art teacher in grammar school
>starts sperging about authorial intention
>says that "we shouldn't make up our interpretations of Shakespeare's intent, we should instead actually read what he wrote himself about his works"
>I point out that Shakespeare never wrote about his works
>she completely ignores me and keeps talking
Fuck, I'm still mad

>art is subjective

This thread has made me lose all hope for Veeky Forums. Literature is art and like other art, the work captures a spirit and an essence otherwise left unnoticed. Fucking Picasso didn't write essays on how to look at Guernica nor did Rembrandt talk about how to look at his art. However, they made the art, crafted it, and formed it purposefully. We don't need to have auxillary works to dig up intent but we know it's there. Keeping with the art metaphor, Da Vinci made the Last Supper and he chose what to include in the work and what not to include in the work which shapes our opinions of it. If Mary fucking Magdalene was in the painting we'd be having an entirely different conversation about the painting. Authors write with purpose and what they include or don't include affects us the reader more than our opinions will ever affect the way others view the art.

Imagine having a conversation with someone who could not communicate their ideas well at all, kept using words inappropriately, and then got mad when you misunderstood them because "no, what I REALLY meant was THIS." You would say, "then you should have fucking SAID that."

Forget author intent vs reader interpretation. It's author ABILITY vs reader interpretation. (Incidentally, people on here often ask what makes writing postmodern, and I think it is writing that plays with this relationship, and I fucking love it.)

I mostly agree with you. Did you post this to attack my position or...?

All aesthetic value is subjective and there is not a single convincing argument to the contrary

Oh look it's another thread about author intent vs the inherent value of the work

try reading literally anything on the matter then

I'm saying authorial intent is there and we as readers should be receptive to it.

this

>Oh look it's another thread about author intent vs the inherent value of the work

The same could be said of ALL religious experience, user.

>I unironically read Faulkner

>Reading Derrida.
>Ever.

It's like you enjoy being retarded.

I'm pretty sure that we essentially agree. Of course, the author did intend something and he tried to express that through his text. Authorial intent that I don't care about is the external one. We shouldn't have to read the author's interviews or explanations to interpret the text, we should only consider the text itself and our interpretation should follow logically from it. You can't read Crime and Punishment and say that the book attacks religion and praises atheism. (Though of course some books will have multiple possible and logical interpretations, such as Kafka's.)

>We shouldn't have to read the author's interviews or explanations to interpret the text

Ray Bradbury would be upset with you.

Grendel. Literally constructed around the Campbellian monomyth, with cyclical structure that contains direct allusion to both several philosophical schools as well as western pop-psy horoscopes. The novel serves as a demonstration of the psychological and philosophical development of the individual, and revels in its use of the greatest Western historical "Other" to do so.

But please, tell me how your faggy po-mo feelings totally override that carefully mixed melange of sources, inspirations and ideas. You fucking hack.

Not that user but could you please point me towards the best argument for objectivity aesthetics?

As if the author didn't intend to have the reader interpret his work in a variety of ways...If not, what kind of 1 dimensional nonsense are you reading, user? Steven King?

So this!

All of those readings would fall within the Authorial Intent camp, you mongoloid. Nobody implied that author's can't have deliberately open-to-interpretation works.
Its when faggots pull shit completely unsupported by the author like "THE BLUE CURTAINS ARE SYMBOLICAL FOR THE OPPRESSION OF THE PROLETARIAT!!!" and then end up reading the exact same preconceived theme into every work without argument that it becomes a problem.

Then I hope his collected interviews are bundled together with his books, or I'm gonna be upsetting him real hard.

Not that user. Just saying - Grendel is a postmodern book.

>authors write to express some kind of idea/emotion to an audience
>hurr the author's intent doesn't matter
It's almost like the postmodernists are trying to destroy art or something

>lambasts authors not being able to express things clearly
>praises postmodernism
You are an idiot.

Explain to me why the authors intent is more relevant than the readers interpretation?

And even if the author did not "intend" to write in double meanings, how can we be so sure that their subconscious isn't influencing their writings?

Another point is this, haven't you wrote something (assuming you write) that seems to be divinely inspired, where it seems to magically appear on the paper? I have, and I know many other writers who have experienced this same thing. Plato even discusses it. How does your claim react with this phenomena?

Genre fiction readers don't care about authorial intent. Actually, naive readers of all kinds don't comprehend authorial intent. A pleb reads books in order to identify with the characters. What postmodernists do is not so far off from that.

Most times authors intents are known though, we usually know their economic, social, political, and religious background before we even open a book. Just look at any 19th century French author, they really weren't being all that vague about their likes Or dislikes of the bourgeois or peasants etc, unless we're talking some poetry.

>hurr as long as the artist can explain their poorly constructed work, were don't need them to refine it into a successful communication.

The post I replied to said that authorial intent is unknowable.

it is unknowable, all intent is unknowable

the theory of intent is literal animism lol

So you like Evola and Hitler, right? Kys commie

No, it's not like we're "having a conversation" because a conversation typically does not happen between 1 person's writing and millions of readers 100s of years later.

>authors write to express some kind of idea/emotion to an audience

who told you this? where did you get this idea from? answer sincerely

evola and hitler are not important philosophers

you obviously have never read criticism lol

Writing is a purely intellectual expression. It goes without saying that thought and intent are inherent to the medium.

Using words is the expression of one's intent. You go.

As long as you know what you're getting yourself in for and can bracket off your readings of Derrida, reading him can be a rewarding and useful mental exercise.

You didn't understand my post, and you seem to be one of those people who strawmans postmodern writing as incomprehensible or incoherent randomness rather than a play on the relationship between intent and interpretation. Obviously, people can be skilled or unskilled at doing this, so I really don't think you understood my post.