Author: Gary Iseminger
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439905940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
"...an excellent and comprehensive discussion of a debate that was initiated in this century in William Wimsatt's and Monroe C. Beardsley's influential article 'The Intentional Fallacy.'...this is a splendidly conceived and very useful collection of essays. Readers will want to take issue with the arguments of individual authors, but this is to be expected in a volume at the cutting edge of a fertile philosophical controversy." --David Novitz, The Philosophical Quarterly "What is the connection, if any, between the author's intentions in (while) writing a work of literature and the truth (acceptability, validity) of interpretive statements about it?" With this question, Gary Isminger introduces a literary debate that has been waged for the past four decades and is addressed by philosophers and literary theorists in Intention and Interpretation. Thirteen essays discuss the role of appeals to the author's intention in interpreting works of literature. A well-known argument by E.D. Hirsch serves as the basic text, in which he defends the appeal to the author's intention against Wimsatt and Beardsley's claim that such an appeal involved "the intentional fallacy." The essays, mostly commissioned by the editor, explore the presuppositions and consequences of arguing for the importance of the author's intentions in the way Hirsch does. Connections emerge between this issue and many fundamental issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind as well as in aesthetics. The (old) "New Criticism" and current Post-Structuralism tend to agree in disenfranchising the author, and many people now are disinclined even to consider the alternative. Hirsch demurs, and arguments like his deserve the careful attention, both from critics and sympathizers, that they receive here. Literary scholars and philosophers who are sympathetic to Continental as well as to Anglo-American styles of philosophy are among the contributors. "This is a timely book appearing as it does when postmodernist views of the death of the author are disappearing quickly from the scene. As a collection it exemplifies the best work that is being done on this problem at the moment, and it will no doubt inspire further debate." --The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism "[T]his volume contains important articles illuminating the central debate over the role and relevance of authorial intentions in literary interoperation." --British Journal of Aesthetics
Author: Ralf Grüttemeier
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110767856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Intention plays a complex role in human utterances. The interpretation of literary texts is a strong case in point: for about two hundred years there have been conflicting views about whether, and how much, authorial intention should matter when professional readers interpret literature. These debates grew increasingly fierce during the post-World War II period, the landmarks of which were the notions of intentional fallacy and the death of the author. Seventy-odd years later, there is still no consensus in sight. What has always been neglected in the debates around authorial intention, however, is a reflection on the historical dimension of the debate and how historically bound each of the theoretical positions in the debate were. This book focusses precisely on the historical dimension of authorial intention, providing a systematic historical reconstruction of the importance ascribed to it in literary texts from Classical Greece to the present day, and including a chapter on authorial intention in jurisdiction and legal interpretation from a historical perspective. The book reconstructs a typology of the most important concepts of intention in interpretation for diachronic and synchronic use. At the same time it offers insights from a field-theoretical perspective into how literary studies as a discipline works over time and how notions of intention and interpretation help create forms of literary knowledge.
Author: Richard Ekins
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191645931
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Are legislatures able to form and act on intentions? The question matters because the interpretation of statutes is often thought to centre on the intention of the legislature and because the way in which the legislature acts is relevant to the authority it does or should enjoy. Many scholars argue that legislative intent is a fiction: the legislative assembly is a large, diverse group rather than a single person and it seems a mystery how the intentions of the individual legislators might somehow add up to a coherent group intention. This book argues that in enacting a statute the well-formed legislature forms and acts on a detailed intention, which is the legislative intent. The foundation of the argument is an analysis of how the members of purposive groups act together by way of common plans, sometimes forming complex group agents. The book extends this analysis to the legislature, considering what it is to legislate and how members of the assembly cooperate to legislate. The book argues that to legislate is to choose to change the law for some reason: the well-formed legislature has the capacity to consider what should be done and to act to that end. This argument is supported by reflection on the centrality of intention to the nature of language use. The book then explains in detail how members of the assembly form and act on joint intentions, which do not reduce to the intentions of each member, before outlining some implications of this account for the practice of statutory interpretation. Developing a robust account of the nature and importance of legislative intention, the book represents a significant contribution to the literature on deliberative democracy that will be of interest to all those thinking about legal interpretation and constitutional theory.
Author: Keith E. Whittington
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
With its detailed and wide-ranging explorations in history, philosophy, and law, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Constitution ought to be interpreted and what it means to live under a constitutional government."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: John Maynard
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1551118971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
This accessible, personal, and provocative study returns to the major subject in literary discussion before and during the relatively recent flourishing of literary theory, that of literary intention. Does the author’s personal intention or historical site determine a correct interpretation of a literary work? Probing the entire range of issues connected with this many-faceted and knotty concept, this book engages with interpretation on both theoretical and practical levels. It argues that the hard questions about interpretation connected to issues of intention cannot be sidestepped or ignored. It does not argue for conservative concepts of literature itself, nor against the major historical engagements of critics in our time. But in addressing those who continue to read or teach literature, it does insist on a level of sophistication in issues of literary interpretation that cannot be assured by historical research and knowledge of the social and cultural connections to literary works. The overall aim of the work is to recall readers to the great complexity, pleasure, and interest of literary interpretation.
Author: Kalle Puolakka
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739150820
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
The question of the relativity of interpretations and the relevance of the author's intentions for interpretation has been at the center of controversy for the past century in different philosophical traditions, but there has been very little effort to examine the different ways this question has been addressed in contemporary philosophy within the space of a single book. Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation. Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism brings diverse philosophical viewpoints to bear on these issues, addressing them through analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, and pragmatism. Kalle Puolakka develops a view of interpretation drawing on Donald Davidson's late philosophy of language and mind defending the role of authorial intentions against criticisms intentionalist views have received particularly in hermeneutics and pragmatism. In addition to relativism and intentionalism, the book discusses such issues as the role of imagination and aesthetic experience in interpretation, and it presents a thorough critique of hermeneutic conceptions of interpretation which emphasize the essential historical nature of our understanding. Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation shows how it is possible to combine a pluralistic attitude towards art without resurrecting the role of the author's intentions in interpretation.
Author: Ronald Benton Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Author: Kathleen Stock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198798342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'. The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth: better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we 'resist' imagining certain fictions? What, in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?
Author: Renée Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1599906686
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
A captivating and poignant coming-of-age urban YA debut about sisters, friends, and what it means to embrace change.
Author: Paisley Livingston
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191535176
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Do the artist's intentions have anything to do with the making and appreciation of works of art? In Art and Intention Paisley Livingston develops a broad and balanced perspective on perennial disputes between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists in philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He surveys and assesses a wide range of rival assumptions about the nature of intentions and the status of intentionalist psychology. With detailed reference to examples from diverse media, art forms, and traditions, he demonstrates that insights into the multiple functions of intentions have important implications for our understanding of artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, conceptions of texts, works, and versions, basic issues pertaining to the nature of fiction and fictional truth, and the theory of art interpretation and appreciation. Livingston argues that neither the inspirationist nor rationalistic conceptions can capture the blending of deliberate and intentional, spontaneous and unintentional processes in the creation of art. Texts, works, and artistic structures and performances cannot be adequately individuated in the absence of a recognition of the relevant makers ́ intentions. The distinction between complete and incomplete works receives an action-theoretic analysis that makes possible an elucidation of several different senses of 'fragment' in critical discourse. Livingston develops an account of authorship, contending that the recognition of intentions is in fact crucial to our understanding of diverse forms of collective art-making. An artist's short-term intentions and long-term plans and policies interact in complex ways in the emergence of an artistic oeuvre, and our uptake of such attitudes makes an important difference to our appreciation of the relations between items belonging to a single life-work. The intentionalism Livingston advocates is, however, a partial one, and accomodates a number of important anti-intentionalist contentions. Intentions are fallible, and works of art, like other artefacts, can be put to a bewildering diversity of uses. Yet some important aspects of art's meaning and value are linked to the artist ́s aims and activities.
