Literary intention and literary education

TL;DRAbstract

References to an author's intention in the discussion of works of literature largely disappeared from literary critical currency in the 1950s, partly as a consequence of Wimsatt and Beardsley's classic paper, ‘The intentional fallacy’, of 1946. Given the usual lag between new or altered conceptions among those at the forefront of a discipline and their adoption in schools it is only in recent years that one might expect the conceptual currency of teachers to reflect the change. A visitor to an English classroom is still likely to encounter the teacher who asks his students to decipher the intention of the author of the literary work under scrutiny, but it is less common than it used to be. Since I believe that, in general, school students ought not to be encouraged to seek an author's intention it concerns me that a number of philosophers and critics have tried, in recent years, to reinstate the pursuit of author's intentions as a non-fallacious and important critical enterprise. In wh

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