Conflict Between Author’s Intentionality and the Reader’s Interpretation

Jordan Tian

Jennifer Johnson

May 3, 2020

Purpose:
 In this research report, I am going to mainly focus on the ideas of the author’s

intentionality and the reader’s interpretation. The reason I choose this to be my topic is that as

an international student from China, I went to primary school through high school in China,

and I feel the reading tests in China are non-intuitive. Here is an example, there was a reading

test article named “Blue Curtain”. This is the question they ask in the test: can you explain

why does the author say the curtain is blue instead of another color as the title indicates? Due

to the reason that my readers mostly never read the article, because it was published in 1987

in China, so they may not answer the question, I will simply write out the answer to it. The

reason the author emphasizes that the curtain is blue here is that blue gives readers a sense of

melancholy, and the curtain keeps sunshine out of the room, which insinuates the darkness of

the Chinese people’s living under feudal government control during the 1900s to 1920s. The

author used the blue curtain to express dissatisfaction with society at that time. If you cannot

understand why blue represents melancholy, maybe you can think about Blues music. So,

basically, the author uses the blue curtain as a metaphor to express his intention. Can you

believe this is the right answer to a free response question of a reading test? The most

dramatic thing is that when the students sent the test to the author, the author responded that

the curtain was blue, nothing very special. The curtain is what he wants to emphasize because

it is the main theme of the article. Actually, if you think about it, the professor’s answer also

makes sense, but it is not the author’s intention there. So, this example reveals two problems

which are the main topic of my research.

1. Is it likely for readers to interpret what the author’s intention is while reading?

2. Is it likely for one reader to have the same interpretation of the author’s

intention as the other reader has?

 In order to solve these two problems. I look through several papers related to

the idea of the author’s intentionality and the readers’ interpretation, and I will explain

them in the result part of this report, and use them to solve these two problems.

Materials:

CompPile where I can find the reference. https://wac.colostate.edu/comppile/

Google search engine

UCSB library databases

Methods and Process of Research:

1. Develop my research question relating to writing, reading, and literacy.

2. Summarize the question into some keywords, such as “intentionality,”

“interpretation”

3. Visit CompPile database to search the sources I might use in the paper.

4. Locate the source on the internet by Google or UCSB library.

5. Find the most interesting conversation I want to listen in (which I actually did

in the first step).

6. Read through the sources and compare them.

7. Summarize the result, and determine the genre I will use to share my result. I

decided the ‘lab report’ form is the best way for me.
 8. Write the first draft and do peer review.

Results:

In the article “Centre for the study of reading.” As Bruce (1981) stated, "Texts are

written by authors who expect meaning-making on the part of readers and read by readers

who do the meaning-making."

Tierney and LaZansky explained this sentence as that writers, as they produce text,

consider what they want their readers to engage. Readers, as they comprehend the text,

respond to not only what writers want them to do, but also what readers themselves conceive

they need to do. They say “Consistent with these notions we contend that reading and writing

are both acts of composing engaged in as individuals transact with each other and their inner

selves.” This procedure is exactly the same as the daily conversation between people but uses

more complicated words.

What Tierney and LaZansky mean is that text comprehension is not done by only

readers or speakers but done by both of them, which raises two notions. First, that as Firth

(1957) posits, language is fundamentally "a way of behaving and making others behave;" and

second, listeners are compelled either knowingly or intuitively to interpret what is spoken in

the context of who is speaking, and thus find their interpretative efforts bound by both a

message and its creator. Writers write out the words with a certain intention. Readers

interpret it not only based on the understanding of what the author is doing, which comes

from the first notion but also links the author’s intention with his action, which comes from

the second notion.

Fillmore (1974) describes the process of the reader’s interpretation in this way.
 A text induces the interpreter to construct an image or maybe a set of

alternative images. The image the interpreter creates early in the text

guides his interpretation of successive portions of the text and these in

turn induce him to enrich or modify that image. While the image

construction and image revision is going on, the interpreter is also trying

to figure out what the creator of the text is doing--what the nature of the

communication situation is. And that, too, may have an influence on the

image creating process. (p. 4)

So, a failure to understand the author's intentions would result in a failure to link the

author's actions with his purpose.

Further, Tierney and LaZansky also say "in cases in which the reader does understand

adequately, the ability to perceive the author's intentions can still make the difference

between minimally sufficient comprehension and deep understanding of a text."

Hirsch supports this idea by pointing out that our experience of the particular of

perception depends on our preconceptions about the whole of which they are apart, and that,

since our conception of the whole must depend equally on our preconceptions about the parts,

our experience of the world is circular, or confined to an inevitable give and take between

these two sets of mutually informing preconceptions. Nothing can be known, apart from its

context, therefore, and the result is the famous "hermeneutic circle," or a sort of perceptual

"flux”.

Gage explains the Hirsch points in his article. As readers we make such acts of

separation whenever we conceive of meaning as stable, even though we may not agree on

what the meaning is, and apart from the innumerable significances that meaning may have in
accidental contexts. The fact that we do interpret meaning, however disparately, is evidence

that we can conceive of it as there, as a potential object for consideration, as Hirsch points.

Discussion and Analysis:

It is time for us to go back to our question

1. Is that possible for readers to interpret what the author’s intention is while

reading?

From listening in on the scholars’ conversation, I have learned that it is

possible for readers to interpret the author’s intention given that the reader has the

same perceptions as the author has and they also have the ability to link the

author’s intentions with his purpose.

2. Is that possible for one reader to have the same interpretation of the author’s

intention as the other reader has?

Again, if two readers have the same perceptions to some degree, and they both

understand adequately the author’s intentions, then it is possible for two readers to

have the same interpretation of the author’s intention. However, most of the

readers do not share the same perceptions, so it is unlikely for two readers to

interpret the readings in the same way. Just like a well-known Chinese proverb

goes ‘There are a thousand Hamlet in a thousand people’s eyes.’ If you cannot

understand this, you can interpret it as ‘There are a thousand ways to interpret a

passage.’ Do you see how different perceptions leading to different results? I am

Chinese, and you are American, I assume, you may not understand the proverb

before I explain it.

 Going back to the reading test in China, I do not think students have the same

perceptions as the testers have, so it is unreasonable to ask a question about interpreting the

author’s intentionality during the exam in my point of view.

Works Cited

1. Bruce, B. C. Plans and social actions. In R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, & W.F. Brewer
(Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980.
2. Robert J. Tierney, and Jill LaZansky. Center for the Study of Reading: Author’s
Intentions and Readers’ Interpretation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
May 1983.
3. Firth, J. R. The technique of semantics. In Papers in Linguistics, 1934-1951. London:
O.U.P., 1957.
4. Fillmore, C. Future of semantics. In Fillmore, Lakoff, & Lakoff (Eds.),Berkeley
studies in syntax and semantics, 1974.
5. Gage, John T. Conflicting Assumptions about Intention in Teaching Reading and
Composition. National Council of Teachers of English. Nov., 1978.