ENG2167 & 4167: Reading questions for week 6

Nicholas Allott, ILOS, UiO

Modern pragmatics assumes that when a hearer or reader is trying to understand what a speaker or
writer means, the question the hearer/reader is trying to answer is basically ‘What does the
speaker/writer want me to think as a result of hearing/reading this utterance?’
That is, working out speaker meaning is a matter of working out one of the speaker’s intentions.
(This view of speaker meaning and the task of the hearer comes directly from Grice: remember that an
implicature is defined as an implication of an utterance that the speaker intends to convey.)

So pragmatic literary stylistics – e.g. Chapman’s analysis of The Last September that we looked at
two weeks ago – is based on the assumption that it will be interesting/helpful/revealing to think about
what the author intended the text to convey, and how what she has written fulfils her intention by its
effect on the reader: e.g. What does she actually write? What does she not actually write but
intentionally imply (i.e. implicate), and how? How does the reader figure out what is implied? Etc.

This seems to clash with a very influential view (or two closely related views, perhaps) about literary
interpretation: the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946) and ‘The Death of the Author’
(Barthes, 1967).

The aims of the seminar this week are to

1) Understand the Intentional Fallacy claim.
2) See some arguments that have been given for it.
3) Understand the notion from relevance theory of ‘weak communication’.
4) See how (Deirdre Wilson claims) the notion of weak communication can allow us to do
intentional pragmatic analyses of literary texts (i.e. to do what the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ people
say is impossible/undesirable)
5) Try to use the notion of weak communication in some literary analysis.

The Intentional ‘Fallacy’

Wimsatt and Beardsley write that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor
desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literature”. (1946, p. 468)
So the claim that they say is a fallacy (i.e. is false) is the claim that the intention of the author is
available and/or desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literature.
Basically, they are saying that when you interpret a literary text, the intentions of the author are (or
should be) irrelevant.

To do

I Understanding the Intentional ‘Fallacy’ claim

1. Read the second half of p. 70 of Wilson 2011 (i.e. from the heading ‘2 Coding, inference, textual
meaning and authorial meaning’ to the end of the page). What does she say was the goal of
literary criticism according to Wimsatt and Beardsley and similar literary critics?

2. Before you read on, consider whether you tend to agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley or not and
why/why not. Make some – brief – notes of your thoughts/feelings about this.
3. Now read pp. 468–470 of Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946 and note down some of the things that they
say in support of their claim.

II Understanding the counter-arguments

Read p. 71 and the top part of p. 72 of Wilson 2011 and answer these questions:

4. What was Hirsch’s argument that the meaning of a text depends on the author’s intentions?
5. How does Wilson say that pragmatic theories have reinforced Hirsch’s argument in the last thirty
years?
6. What is Wilson’s view of the role of pragmatic theory and speaker intentions in literary
interpretation?

III. Weak communication

Now read the rest of Wilson 2011 and answer these questions:

7. What is the (relevance-theoretic) notion, weak communication? (p. 73; see also p. 78)
8. How does it help (according to Wilson) with the analysis of:
a. Burns’ simile? (pp. 73–4)?
b. The passage from Austen (p. 73)?

Main reading
Wilson, D. (2011). Relevance and the interpretation of literary works. UCL Working Papers in
Linguistics, 23, 69–80.
pp. 468–470 of Wimsatt Jr., W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1946). The intentional fallacy. The Sewanee
Review, 54(3), 468-488. (You can of course read the whole of this paper if you want – it’s very
interesting – but you don’t have to!)

Supplementary reading
If you are interested in how Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ claim relates to the Intentional
‘Fallacy’, you might find it useful to read this short introduction to Barthes’ famous (but in my
opinion) largely incomprehensible paper:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author

If you are interested in what Wilson says about using relevance theoretic pragmatics in the analysis of
literary texts, I strongly recommend looking at this excellent paper by Billy Clark:
Clark, B. (2014). Stylistics and relevance theory. In M. Burke (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of
Stylistics (pp. 155-174). London: Routledge.
(We’re going to look at one of Billy’s other papers in our next seminar. This one is useful
preparation/background for that.)