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Meaning and Intention: The Role of the Author

While it is common place for the everyday reader to assume that the author determines
the meaning of a text, in recent years, several theorists have begun to thoroughly analyze this
notion. In his lecture, Umberto Eco asks the question can we still be concerned with the
empirical author of a text? (67). In order to answer this question, Eco emphasizes the difference
between communication in the form of a letter or a conversation, and communication through a
novel or some other form of text. According to Eco, the main difference is the audience. When
two people are having a conversation, the speaker is only addressing one person, and therefore, it
is the listeners job to interpret the intention of the speaker in this one to one communication.
However, when a text is produced not for a single addressee but for a community of readers- the
author knows that he or she will be interpreted not according to his or her intentions but
according to a complex strategy of interactions (67). In other words, when a text is intended to
have multiple readers, its meaning becomes subject to multiple interactions so that the authors
sole power to determine meaning is removed.
This aforementioned interaction actually involves a transaction between the competence
of the reader (the readers world knowledge) and the kind of competence a given text postulates
(68). Because this transaction involves the knowledge of an individual reader, more than one
meaning of a text is now possible. Eco goes on to illustrate his point by using examples from
some of his own novels. In doing so, he shows that his readers produced meanings and
interpretations of his novels that he, as the author, had not intended but were validated through
the text. This shows that once a text has been written and sent out into the world, the author can
no longer control its meaning(s). For this reason, the author must not be used in order to
validate the interpretations of his text, but to show the discrepancies between the authors

intentions and the intention of the text (73). In this way, the author does have a purpose, but
determining the meaning of the text is not it.
Throughout his essay The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes attempts to diminish
the role of the author. Barthes begins his essay by stating that writing is that neutral, composite,
oblique space where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing (1). In
this case, the body writing that loses its identity is the author of a text. The author loses their
identity because there exists a disconnect between authors and the works they produce due to the
large audiences authors serve. In fact, as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to
acting directly this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his
own death, writing begins (1). Of course, in order for an author to die, at some point the author
had to be living. The author as the authority in determining the meaning of their owns texts is a
modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages when the
author was born (1). Before the birth of the author, the responsibility for a narrative [was]
never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman, or relator so that the emphasis was
placed on the performance of the writing rather than who wrote it (1). According to Barthes, the
first person to begin to bring about the death of author was Mallarme who was the first to realize
that it is language which speaks, not the author (2). For this reason, Mallarme spent much of
his career attempting to suppress the role of the author. All of this shows that the societal view of
the author has changed drastically over time and it should not be controversial that Barthes is
attempting to change the conceptions again.
Once Barthes establishes that conceptions of the author are ever changing throughout
history, he goes on to specifically state the common ideas about what the author is now and how
those ideas will change once the author has died. According to Barthes, the image of literature

to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author and the explanation of a
work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it (2). The consequence of this
attitude is that ideas about the author effect the way everyday people read and understand texts.
For this reason, once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to
close the writing (6). It is dangerous to attempt to limit a text to just one meaning because a
text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of
dialogue, parody, contestation (7). Despite all of these multiplicities, there is one place where
this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader (7). In this way, the reader can be the one
entity that unites all of the factors that go into interpreting a text. However, the reader cannot
gain authority unless the author is willing to relinquish it, for this reason the birth of the reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Author (7).
Similar to Eco, Jonathan Culler also wants to know what determines meaning (66).
According to Culler, there are four factors that help to produce the meaning of a text: the
intention of the speaker, the text itself, historical context, and the experience of the reader. It is
only when all four of these factors are combined that a full and legitimate meaning can possibly
be produced. Due to the fact that arguments are made for all four factors shows that meaning is
complex and elusive, not something once and for all determined by any one of these factors
(66). In this way, Culler acknowledges the authors authority to help determine meaning but
ultimately states that the author cannot be the sole authority. Furthermore, relying on an analysis
of authorial intentions to determine meaning can actually be detrimental to the examination of a
text. This is because the strategy limits the text to the authors personal and historical
circumstances and therefore creates the notion that a text answers the concerns of its moment

of creation and only accidentally the concerns of subsequent readers (67). In effect, this
degenerates later responses to a text and therefore only makes the text valuable at the time it was
written. While Culler is adamant that the author cannot be the sole determiner of meaning, he
does not wish to dismiss the author entirely as he or she does still play a role. Much like Eco,
Culler sees the author as someone invaluable in showing the differences between what the author
intended and what the text actually does which in itself can lead to a legitimate analysis of a text
which would not be possible if the author was dismissed entirely.
If the author does not determine meaning, then the inevitable question remains, who
does? According to Culler, this is a question with no easy answer and he is led to the conclusion
that meaning is context-bound but context is boundless (68). In order to understand this
statement it needs to be broken down a little further. Meaning is context- bound (68), or in
other words, meaning is determined by context. Context is an all-encompassing word that can
include not only the intention of the author, but also factors such as the rules of language, the
situation of the author and reader, and anything else that might conceivably be relevant (68).
The phrase might conceivably be relevant is what leads to Cullers notion in the second half of
the aforementioned statement which is that context is boundless (68). The reason context has
no bounds is that there is no possible way to discern which factors may be relevant in
determining the meaning of a text and which are not so there is no limit to what could possibly
fall under the wide umbrella of context. In order to avoid limiting the possible interpretations
of a text, the sources from which meaning can be derived must be stretched far beyond
the intentions of the author.
According to Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux, there is no way to determine the
authors role in an interpretation of a text until the term author itself is first defined. What is

important to understand is that authors dont only write literature but can also produce works
of philosophy, history, sociology and innumerable other disciplines (10). Furthermore, if the
term author cannot be limited only to those who write literature, it should also not be limited
only to those who work in print. For example, the definition of the author should be expanded to
filmmakers or visual artists so as to include a multitude of cultural procedures. However, even
this idea of the term author is not inclusive enough for Nealon and Giroux because it is also
relevant that the word author can be a verb as well as a noun, and that even the noun names a
social action (10). Sales managers author[ing] quarterly reports or architects and
construction workers author[ing] buildings are just two examples of this (10). When the
definition of what an author is becomes so inclusive, the concept of the author itself now
becomes increasingly ambiguous. For this reason, the term author must necessarily begin as a
verb, or someone doing something before it can be turned into a noun and thought of in the
traditional sense of an author (someone who has written something down).
Once a new conception of the author is created, Nealon and Giroux can address this
newly defined authors role in determining the meaning of his or her text. When examining the
authors of a few great text, it becomes increasingly clear why Nealon and Giroux seem to
wonder why modern Americans ever gave the author authority of interpretation at all. Stories
such as Beowulf which have been passed down from generation to generation are the first source
of proof that an author is entirely unnecessary when the construction of meaning is concerned.
Beowulf is a prime example because for all intents and purposes the legend does not have an
author, (the tale most likely entered the world through oral storytelling and has been told by so
many that to attempt to find its origins would be pointless) yet somehow modern readers are still
able to produce interpretations of the text even without knowing its author. Of course, Beowulf is

not the only example and works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey also have absent authors as
Homer is a composite figure under which multiple oral tales were grouped and therefore not an
author in the traditional sense (14). Even when there is no author, it is still possible to interpret a
text, thus it is illogical to say that the author could be the sole determiner of meaning.
When the author of a text is known, Nealon and Giroux assert that there is little to be
gained from this knowledge. In regards to authors that are known but long gone (such as
Shakespeare) little more is known about them than the author of Beowulf because all of the
knowledge is mostly based off second hand accounts or obscure biographical facts that may have
little or nothing to do with the text that is being interpreted (17). While knowing that
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet might help to determine how Shakespeare felt about the play, this
knowledge does little to help the play have relevancy in the modern world. Furthermore, even
when the author is both known and alive so that her or she can directly state what his or her
intentions were, it should be noted that some of the most celebrated authors actually intend for
their texts to be open to a multiplicity of meanings. To continue along the same line, even if the
author outright states a single intention in writing the text it does not mean that the text itself is
incapable of taking on a life of its own and creating new meanings. For this reason, the emphasis
should be placed not on the meaning the author intended, but rather on the meaning the text itself
produces.
While the aforementioned theorists have all been united in their attempts to diminish the
role of the author, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader E.D. Hirsch Jr. works to bring
about the rebirth of the author. Hirsch begins his chapter In Defense of the Author by noting
that in the past four decades there has been a heavy and largely victorious assault on the
sensible belief that a text means what its author meant (265). This came as a result of a new

notion that a text is impersonal, objective, and autonomous; that it leads an afterlife of its own,
totally cut off from the life of its author (265). While many theorists argue that the banishment
of the author was only logical, Hirsch claims that the move towards authorial irrelevance was
done for historical not logical reasons, since no logical necessity compels a critic to banish an
author in order to analyze his text (266). However, it cannot be said that the theory of
authorial irrelevance was inferior to the theories or quasi theories it replaced, nor can it be
doubted that the effect of banishing the author was wholly beneficial and invigorating (266). In
other words, at the time of its inception, authorial irrelevance made sense; it was only after
several decades that the difficulties associated with the theory of authorial irrelevance emerged
and are responsible for that uneasiness which persists in the academics (266).
Once he established that the banishment of the author is illogical, Hirsch identified
several negative consequences associated with the authorial irrelevance theory. The biggest
consequence is that once the author has been ruthlessly banished as the determiner of his texts
meaning, it very gradually appeared that no adequate principle existing for judging the validity
of an interpretation (266). In other words, once the author is removed there is no specific way to
determine which interpretations of a text are valid and which are not. Another issue with the
application of the authorial irrelevance theory is that if a text is not representative of the authors
meaning, it still has to represent someones meaning. In this way, all the banishment of the author
has led to is the total authority of the critic which is even less logical than giving authority to the
person who actually wrote the text. Finally, in the hasty banishment of the author, the fact that
meaning is a consciousness of words was ignored (267). No sequence of words can have
meaning unless a human being assigns them one, therefore, it is most logical that the human who
sequenced certain words (the author) should be the one to connect them to a meaning. When

literary critics try to take the place of the author, however, it can only lead to disagreements and
confusion.
While Hirsch makes a logical argument in defense of the author, the arguments of Eco,
Barthes, Culler, and Nealon and Giroux are more convincing. Although all of these arguments
are very different, they are united by the idea that the author should not be considered the sole
determiner of meaning. This is because giving the author total authority limits the text to only
one possible meaning and leaves no room for exploration or discovery. For this reason, using
authorial intent to determine the meaning of a text actually has more negative consequences than
those lined out by Hirsch.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings
in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Eric Dayton. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview,
1998. Print.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP,
1997. Print.
Eco, Umberto. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002. Print.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood.
Third ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Nealon, Jeffery, and Susan Giroux. The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities,
Arts, & Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Print.