intentionality

intentionality, in modern literary theory, the study of authorial intention in a literary work and its corresponding relevance to textual interpretation. With the ascendancy of New Criticism after World War I, much of the debate on intentionality addressed whether information external to the text could help determine the writer’s purpose and whether it was even possible or desirable to determine that purpose.

Modernist critics, such as T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, and John Crowe Ransom, rejected the subjectivity of Romantic critics, whose criteria emphasized originality and individual experience. With the publication of their influential essay “The Intentional Fallacy” in The Sewanee Review in 1946, authors W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley questioned further the value of searching for authorial intention. Other critics such as E.D. Hirsch, Jr., stressed that knowledge of the author’s intention is necessary for determining a work’s success; without that knowledge, he argued, it is impossible to determine whether the work satisfies the original intention.