Authorial Intent, Audience Experience: Think of the literary event as having a grammar, with nouns and verbs, with subjects, actions, and objects. Just as there is a layer of action between the subject of the author and the object of the text, call this action intent, there is another layer of action between the object of the text and the subject of the reader, call it experience.

The Intentionalist Thesis: According to “the intentionalist thesis,” meaning equals intent. From this perspective, interpretation is the search for the author’s intent.

Author as Creator: The word author has always had the idea of parentage associated with it: in Old English (and Old French) both mothers and fathers were called “auctors.” As all mothers and fathers know, parentage involves the dual responsibility of both creating and controlling a child. From the perspective of rhetorical theory, the author of a text creates it, clearly, but does the author control it? What is the relationship between an author, understood as “one who creates a text,” and an authority, understood as “one who has power or control”? In other words, is the author who creates a text the authority who has control over its meaning?

Access to Authorial Intent: My answer will be “yes” – a text means what its author intended it to mean – but the fact that the author controls the meaning of a text does not mean that we as readers, critics, and scholars have access to that meaning.

The Inaccessibility of Authorial Intent: As a rule, an author’s intent is inaccessible.

Accessibility to Audience Experience: All anyone has access to is his or her experience trying to make sense of a text. In other words, interpretation, understood as the search for the author’s intent, is really an account of the particular kind of experience a reader has when trying to make sense of a text.

Intent as a Creation of Experience: The author’s intent is, and always has been, a construction of the reader’s experience with a text. Paradoxically, “the intentionalist thesis” could be called “the experientialist thesis”: a text means what we think it means when we try to imagine what the author wanted it to mean.

Intent as Useful Fiction: The concept of meaning is only invoked in special circumstances when there arises a problem in the absolutely routine matter of understanding. Intent is a heuristic or useful fiction that we imagine in order to stabilize our conversations about meaning. It is not the author’s intent that we describe when we give the meaning of a text; it is our best estimation of the author’s intent.

Imagining Authorial Intent: When we experience a text, our experience is that of trying to imagine what the author’s intent is. The unavailability of the author’s intent (1) does not indicate that no intent exists and (2) does not prevent us from attempting to imagine what it was.

Interpretation as the Experience of Searching for Intent: From this perspective, the intentionalist thesis means that interpretation is the search for the particular kind of experience a reader has when trying to make sense of a text.

The Necessary Failure of Interpretation: Thus interpretation is a necessarily compromised activity. Insofar as it is meant to be the relation of a message from an author – i.e., the intent – interpretation cannot make good on its promise.

The Gaps Between Intents and Texts: It must be acknowledged that not every aspect of a text is necessarily intended by its author, and not every authorial intent eventually appears in a text.

Authors on Their Intents: Let’s say an author comes right out and says what he or she intended a text to mean. Isn’t that authorial intent accessible? If Edmund Spenser says that The Faerie Queene is an allegory for Elizabethan England, doesn’t that mean that The Faerie Queene is an allegory for Elizabethan England? If JK Rawling says that Dumbledore was gay, doesn’t that mean that Dumbledore was gay? No, not at all: what that means is that Dumbledore is gay in JK Rawlings account of the experience she has when she tries to make sense of what she was doing when she created the character of Dumbledore.

Intent as (Inaccessible) Historical Fact: The author’s intent is a historical fact; it either was or wasn’t this or that. But I don’t have access to that historical fact any more then I have access to the historical fact of who killed JFK.

The Death of the Author: This moment in this line of thought is commonly called “the death of the author.” To say that the author is dead is not to say that the concept of an author is absurd. The author still exists: the existence of a text still demands the existence of an author. Obviously living and breathing poets write poems all the time. To say that the author is dead is simply to say that the author and his or her intent are inaccessible to the audience of a text.

After the Death of the Author: What is the situation for interpretation after “the death of the author”? Is interpretation possible? Can a text mean whatever you want it to mean? Is one interpretation of a text necessarily just as good as another?

Interpretation as Persuasion and Consensus: After “the death of the author,” interpretation is a matter of persuasion and consensus. That is, the meaning of a text is determined by whoever can produce an account of his or her attempt to make sense of a text that is compelling to the people who are interested in that text (usually some sort of professional organization).

Interpretation, Meaning, Intent, Experience, Persuasion, Truth: In sum, interpretation is the search for meaning. Meaning equals intent. Intent is inaccessible. Experience is all we have. Persuasive articulation of experience is truth.

Truth as Usefulness: Thus, when we interpret something, we provide an account, not of an author’s intent, but of our attempt to discover an author’s intent, an account that is “true,” not if it can be demonstrated with historical documentation of the author’s intent, but if and only if it proves useful to others in their own attempts to make sense of that text and other texts.

Truth as Plausibility: When you provide an account of the intent of the author, your claim is not historical but theoretical. That is, your claim need not be a claim that is historically demonstrable; instead, it should be a claim that is logically plausible. As such, truth is a matter not of accuracy but of usefulness.

Redefining Interpretation: Interpretation is the name we give to the activity we perform when we search, necessarily inconclusively yet inevitably productively, for the intent of that author(s) of a text the meaning of which is, for some reason, confusing or not obvious.

Meaning as Probable Intent: Meaning is not the actual intent but the probable intent of the author.

Claiming Intent: Thus, when making claims about authorial intent, your rhetoric may be speculative, conjectural, subjunctive: “It may be,” “It is possible,” “Perhaps,” “Maybe,” “Arguably,” “It seems,” etc.

Writing About Intent: When writing about the author’s intent, don’t tell your reader that the author had an intent or that we need to look into the author’s intent. The search for intent is the basis of literary studies (and, I would argue, all interpretation), so your reader already knows that the author did things purposefully and that we’re going to search for that purpose when we write a paper. Reminding your reader that the author had an intent and that you’re searching for it pulls your reader out of that search. As always, show, don’t tell.