Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 11:45:28 -0400
From: Brian Connery <connery-AT-Oakland.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Intentional Fallacy




Isn't this again the issue of authority?  Who has authority over the
text's meaning?


I'm struck by how different some people's analyses are here from the
positions they took in regard to political authority.


In any case, I'd like to push the discussion to its inevitable crux with
the thought problem of an intentionless text.  Beardsley, in one of his
last essays I believe, claims that a computer generated text is as
meaningful and as potentially beautiful as a human generated one. 
Barthes, in "The Death of the Author," like Reg in gesturing towards
<italic>Hopscotch</italic>, claims that much modern literature is, in
fact, intentionless.  


(Knapp and Benn Michaels, in the essay that Howard mentioned a long time
ago, "Against Theory," claim the opposite--saying that squiggles on the
sand of a beach that look like letters remain squiggles until we posit an
author who intends (i.e., means) something.)


Whaddayall think?


As an aside, for those of you who haven't heard it before, let me tell
you a quick story.  In my grad school days, I accommodated an incoming
MFA student who had won several national prizes for a short story
featuring a brilliant representation of a naive, semi-literate
first-person narrator.   After a few weeks in the MFA program and after
he'd found his own apartment, he came to me to ask to enroll in my frosh
comp class, at the advice of the MFA program director.  The naive,
semi-literate first-person narrator was not, it turned out, an artifice. 
It was his own voice.  (He left the program and now writes screenplays in
Hollywood.  He's very successful.)


Should/can his intention be disregarded in a reading of his story?



Brian





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Brian Connery

connery-AT-oakland.edu

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