Q.

The intentional fallacy is the idea in literary criticism that the

meaning of a text is whatever the author intended the text to mean."
Discuss.
Ans: One of the critical concepts of New Criticism, “Intentional Fallacy”
was formulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley in an essay in The Verbal
Icon as the mistake of attempting to understand the author’s intentions
when interpreting a literary work. Claiming that it is fallacious to base a
critical judgment about the meaning or value of a literary work on
“external evidences” concerning the author’s intention, Wimsatt and
Beardsley held that “the design or intention of the author is neither
available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work
of literary art.” This is closely associated with the New Critical notion of
the “autotelic text”, according to which the meaning of a work is
contained solely within the work itself, and any attempt to understand
the author’s intention violates the autonomy of the work. So broadly
speaking intentional fallacy refers to the error of evaluating a work by
the intention of an author. According to multiple perspective there are
multiple argument related to presence and absence of authorial intent
in understanding of any text. This statement is based on a set of ideas-
First, a writer or artist's intention cannot be the standard or criterion to
judge the merit of the work.
The second idea, since one cannot understand intention at the moment
of the work's creation, one has only the work itself to testify to its
success and merit.
Third, a written work has meaning because of its words, and its success
or failure to communicate hinges on its perceived relevance. Since we
always read to better understand ourselves and the world, we look at
art to see how it relates to our lives.
Thus in contrast to the open-ended multiple interpretations that are
viewed as valid in literary criticism today, Wimsatt and Beardsley (and
their fellow New Critics) believed that each text had a specific meaning.
The meaning of a text can only be deciphered correctly through a
meticulous examination of the mechanics and structural components of
the text itself.
All personal matters having to do with the author, the author's
biography, or the author's imposition of meaning upon the text can
serve to distract the critic from the only truly reliable indicator of
literary meaning, namely, the indisputable internal evidence within the
poem itself. If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself
shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then
the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the
poem-for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the
poem. So, either the intention to convey a particular meaning is evident
in the work, and therefore it already means that, or the work doesn't
convey that intention, making it irrelevant. The intentions of authors
cannot be seen as some sort of standard or normal method for
considering the meaning of literary texts because it is the text itself,
and the task of reading it, that is speaks with authority. The intentions
of authors can only be a sort of speculation about what was in the
author's mind. It is based upon a rejection of the omniscience of an
author over a text. It liberates the act of readership from the
omniscience of the author. It argues that an author’s intention or
design should not influence the reading of a text. It further argues that
a work of art should not be evaluated through what the author had
intended for the same. The implication is the evaluation of a text is
independent of the author’s intent. It also means that the act of
reading is an autonomous activity which is not controlled by the
author’s intent. Authors are unreliable beings; what they say their work
means may not be what it means at all, and in any case there can be a
huge discrepancy between intention and end result. So the act of
reading becomes an aesthetic, self-serving function which is not
influenced by external factors such as author’s biography. Thus here
Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that it is misguided for readers to assume
that a text means what the author intended it to mean.
As a whole stylistically as well as conceptually, Intentional Fallacy was
against the Romantic conception of literature as a vehicle of personal
expression where Wimsatt and Beardsley tried to pacify this argument
by citing various exemplars from Romantic and Modernist texts.