Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Literature, life and education: some problems about how they relate to one another
- 1 Literature and truth
- 2 Literary criticism and literary education
- 3 Objectivity and subjectivity in literary education
- 4 The subordination of criticism to theory: structuralism and deconstructionism
- 5 Literature and the education of the emotions
- 6 Empathy and literary education
- 7 Literary intention and literary education
- 8 Literature, morality and censorship
- Notes
- Index
7 - Literary intention and literary education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Literature, life and education: some problems about how they relate to one another
- 1 Literature and truth
- 2 Literary criticism and literary education
- 3 Objectivity and subjectivity in literary education
- 4 The subordination of criticism to theory: structuralism and deconstructionism
- 5 Literature and the education of the emotions
- 6 Empathy and literary education
- 7 Literary intention and literary education
- 8 Literature, morality and censorship
- Notes
- Index
Summary
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 what follows I will argue that while some of the points which have been advanced in support of intention-seeking in literature are valid, they do not warrant the re-introduction of the pursuit in the early stages of literary education. For while there are perfectly legitimate (non-fallacious) ways of referring to an author's intention in writing and critically respectable ways of determining this, these will not be readily apparent in the early stages of literary education.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literary EducationA Revaluation, pp. 132 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983