Chapter One: Hermeneutics: the Author, the Text, the

Authorial Intention

1.1. Hermeneutics as a Method of Text Interpretation

Hermeneutics  is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation

of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than
interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails.
Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.Modern
hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication as well as semiotics,
presuppositions, and pre-understandings.

Initially, hermeneutics was applied to the interpretation, or exegesis, of scripture, and has
been later broadened to questions of general interpretation. The
terms hermeneutics and exegesis are sometimes (incorrectly) used interchangeably. As a
matter of fact, it is a wider discipline which includes written, verbal, and non-
verbal communication. Exegesis focuses primarily upon the word and grammar of texts.

The beginning of ancient hermeneutics as a more systematic activity goes back to the
exegesis of the Homeric epics. The most remarkable characteristic of ancient exegesis
was allegorisis (allegoría, from alla agoreuein, i.e., saying something different). This was a
method of nonliteral interpretation of the authoritative texts which contained claims and
statements that seemed theologically and morally inappropriate or false (Tate 1934). In the
Middle Ages the most remarkable characteristic of the interpretative praxis was the so-
called accessus; this was a standardized introduction that preceded the editions and
commentaries of (classical) authors. There were many versions of the accessus, but one of the
more widely used was the following typology of seven questions:

1. Who (is the author)?

2. What (is the subject matter of the text)?

3. Why (was the text written)?

 4. How (was the text composed)?

5. When (was the text written or published)?

6. Where (was the text written or published)?

7. By which means (was the text written or published)?

Johann Conrad Dannhauer was the first to present a systematic textbook on general
hermeneutics (Jaeger 1974), the Idea boni interpretis et malitiosi calumniatoris  (1630)
introducing the Latin neologism hermeneutica . The intention of this work was to
supplement the Aristotelian Organon and its subject matter to distinguish between the true
and false meaning of any text. It is explicitly general in scope, relevant for all scientific
domains and applicable to the oral discourse and texts of all authors. A series of authors
followed the lead of Dannhauer who established the systematic locus of hermeneutics within
logic (Schönert and Vollhardt 2005). Most remarkable is the work of Johann Clauberg (1654),
who introduced sophisticated distinctions between the rules of interpretation with respect to
their generality and clarified the capturing of the intention of the author as a valuable aim of
interpretative praxis. Thus, a general hermeneutics had existed at least two centuries before
Schleiermacher offered his own conception at the beginning of the 19 th century—so his
claim that such a discipline did not already exist before him is simply false.

Shliermacher and others (key ideas)

Text Interpretation through Hermeneutic Approach

Text interpretation goes beyond the interpretation of simple or complex sentences since it
crucially includes a number of inferences that are necessary in order to glean the meaning of
a text. Text interpretation as a goal-directed activity can assume different forms, but must be
distinguished from highlighting the significance of a text. In fact, a series of serious
misunderstandings and confusions can be easily avoided, if a clear distinction is made
between interpretation as an activity directed at the appropriation of the meaning of a
text and textual criticism as an activity that is concerned with the significance of a text with
respect to different values. As Hirsch (1967: 7f.) has correctly pointed out:
Probably the most extreme examples of this phenomenon are cases of authorial self-
repudiation, such as Arnold’s public attack on his masterpiece, Empedocles on Etna, or
Schelling’s rejection of all the philosophy he had written before 1809. In these cases there
cannot be the slightest doubt that the author’s later response to his work was quite different
from his original response. Instead of seeming beautiful, profound, or brilliant, the work
seemed misguided, trivial, and false, and its meaning was no longer one that the author
wished to convey. However, these examples do not show that the meaning of the work had
changed, but precisely the opposite. If the work’s meaning had changed (instead of the
author himself and his attitudes), then the author would not have needed to repudiate his
meaning and could have spared himself the discomfort of a public recantation. No doubt
the significance of the work to the author had changed a great deal, but its meaning had not
changed at all.

[…] Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of
a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand,
names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or
indeed anything imaginable. […] Significance always implies a relationship, and one
constant, unchanging pole of that relationship is what the text means. Failure to consider
this simple and essential distinction has been the source of enormous confusion in
hermeneutic theory.

Even if one acknowledges the difference between meaning and significance, and decides to
honor the distinction between text interpretation and textual criticism, it is undisputable
that interpretation can be directed at many different goals. For a long time the discussion has
centered around the appropriate objective of interpretation and a focal point has been the so-
called intentional fallacy, influentially formulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946: 468),
which states that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a
standard for judging the success of literary work of art”. The crux of the matter in the debate
has been whether grasping the intention of the author of a text is the only aim of
interpretation or not and assuming that authorial intention is indeed the goal of
interpretation, how exactly it can be tracked. The essential question with which we are
confronted in studying any given text, as Quentin Skinner (1969: 48f.) influentially argued, is

what its author, in writing at the time he did write for the audience he intended to address,
could in practice have been intending to communicate by the utterance of this given
utterance. It follows that the essential aim, in any attempt to understand the utterances
themselves, must be to recover this complex intention on the part of the author. And it
follows from this that the appropriate methodology for the history of ideas must be
concerned, first of all, to delineate the whole range of communications which could have
been conventionally performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given
utterance, and, next, to trace the relations between the given utterance and this
wider linguistic context as a means of decoding the actual intention of the given writer.

Besides Quentin Skinner (1972, 1975), Axel Bühler, among others, has contended that it is
possible to identify the author’s intentions, as long as the sources and the transmission of the
text allows this (1999a: 62ff.); and that it is even possible to specify the communicative
intention of the author in fictional texts, in highlighting how the author moves those he or
she is addressing to “act as if” the contents of fictional speech were real (1999a: 66ff.). This
position, broadly known as Hermeneutic Intentionalism (Bühler 1993, 1999b, 2003; see also
2010, in Other Internet Resources), provides arguments designed to show that capturing the
intention of the author is perfectly desirable and fully accessible as an aim of interpretation
and that the intentional fallacy is not a fallacy at all.

Whereas the notion of intention is certainly useful in providing a methodological account of

interpretation, its use is surely part of a later development; and it has been largely imported
into hermeneutic methodology from discussions in philosophy of mind and language that
took place in the analytic tradition in the 20 th century. It was itself a reaction against two
orthodoxies prevailing at the time. On the one hand, that interpretation should aim only at
the concrete text itself; and on the other, that interpretation should aim at the social
context which gave rise (or caused) the creation of the concrete text (Skinner 1969).

The term “nexus of meaning” (Sinnzusammenhang) used by Dilthey and others in the
tradition of classical hermeneutics is, however, more appropriate as a terminus
technicus than the notion of intention. A nexus of meaning, connected with a specific
linguistic expression or a specific text, is construed by the author against the background of
his goals, beliefs, and other mental states while interacting with his natural and social
environment: such a construal of meaning is a complex process and involves both the
conscious and unconscious use of symbols. Text interpretation can be conceptualized as the
activity directed at correctly identifying the meaning of a text by virtue of accurately
reconstructing the nexus of meaning that has arisen in connection with that text.  One way to
describe the nexus of meaning is by using the notion of intention—a legitimate but surely
not an exclusive way. It may well be that the specification of the author’s intention is
adequate for the description of the nexus of meaning but the reconstruction of the nexus of
meaning can also be more complex than that. In other words, in reconstructing the nexus of
meaning, it is not necessary to comply with a specific descriptive system: the process of
reconstruction need not be committed to the use of the concept of intention. Since what is to
be reconstructed is a whole nexus of meaning, a completely different descriptive system can
be used. It is possible to use the intention of the author as well as to incorporate an analysis
of the grammatical elements and other elements in order to produce an adequate
reconstruction.

The notion of the nexus of meaning is central for the methodology of hermeneutics, mainly
because it can accommodate the hermeneutic practices of a series of disciplines. It is obvious
that interpretation in the hermeneutic tradition is conceptualized as a process of
reconstructing nexuses of meaning and represents a process diametrically opposite to the
process of deconstruction as proposed for example by Derrida and his followers. As Rescher
(1997: 201) points out:

The crucial point, then, is that any text has an envisioning historical and cultural context and
that the context of a text is itself not simply textual—not something that can be played out
solely and wholly in the textual domain. This context of the texts that concern us constrains
and limits the viable interpretations that these texts are able to bear. The process
of deconstruction—of interpretatively dissolving any and every text into a plurality of
supposedly merit-equivalent construction—can and should be offset by the process
of reconstruction which calls for viewing texts within their larger contexts. After all, texts
inevitably have a setting—historical, cultural, authorial—on which their actual meaning is
critically dependent.

(How texts were interpreted through hermeneutic approach – grammatical interpretation

and psychological interpretation)

1.2.The concept of the Authorial Intention

The human prototype for communication is face- to- face verbal conversation. Writing and
reading literature are communicative acts, but the experience differs from the prototypical
situation primarily in that the discourse- world is split: reader and author are usually not
present in the same time frame or space, and the direction of the conversation is one- way.
Apart from a few special cases of living authors in contemporary discussion, authors affect
what happens in readers’ minds, but the reverse is not directly the case. Discussions of
literature since antiquity have made assumptions and connections between the content of a
literary work and its author’s life. At its most straightforward, this has resulted in a form of
biographical criticism that regards the literary work unproblematically as an utterance of the
author, without any sense that a text- world boundary has been crossed or a separate text-
world co- created by author and reader within the discourse- world. Such accounts of
literature were common and unquestioned in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
astonishingly, they still feature in the pages of the arts press and many academic journals of
literary criticism even today. Speculations and telepathic claims to insights into authorial
thinking and motivation can be found readily even in the pages of scholarly journals in
literary studies. Although typically framed within a New Historicist materialism, modern
biographical criticism continues to be a significant part of literary historiography. By
contrast, reacting to earlier, even more simplistic treatments of the assumed accessibility of
authorial intention, the New Critics set a prohibition on such discussions (Wimsatt and
Beardsley 1954a) as an ‘intentional fallacy'. The design or intention of the author is neither
available nor desirable as a standard for judging either the meaning or the value of a work of
literary art’ (Wimsatt 1976: 136). The same impulse in different guise came from modernism
with its effacement of the author and from deconstruction with its favouring of readerly and
social freeplay of meaning. In all of these cases, a strong intentionalism and biographical
criticism were regarded as irredeemably Romantic, with a flawed privileging of imagination,
inspiration, creative genius and the transmission of these through a literary work.

For all these reasons, many critical theorists have developed ever more complex accounts of
the relevance of authorial intention in literary reading. Everyone accepts that a set of
intentions as motivations to speak/ write underlie every text, but there is a question as to
how far those intentions are recoverable from the text, and whether that recovery is even
desirable. Very few people think that a writer’s intentions absolutely delimit and close of the
meaning of a text, but perhaps the strongest complex position in this direction is that of E. D.
Hirsch. Hirsch (1967, 1976) differentiates meaning (the socially coded use of language shared
by author and reader) from significance (which he sees as a more critical evaluation). There
is an apparent intention in the former, which can be analysed for precision, but not in the
latter, which is a sort of intuitive guess. However, Hirsch argues that a critic’s sense of
significance has then to be put to a test of validation : once a significance has been perceived,
the ‘logic of validation’ dictates that the critic must demonstrate the scientific basis of their
guess (Hirsch 1967: 207, and see García Landa 1989 for a criticism). This position generally
aims to make any critical assertion objectively falsifiable or verifiable. In this view, there is a
possibility of arriving not so much at a correct meaning but at a verifiably objective one. 1 By
contrast, towards the contrary extreme, Derrida (1980) argues for an emphasis and constant
awareness of the ‘free- play’ of meaning, by which he meant a foregrounding of the potential
for textual meaning to undermine itself. Although Norris (1990: 171) points out that this is
not a free- for- all in which a text can mean anything at all, in practice many
deconstructionist critics have indeed taken this more open attitude. Ironically, the effect for
the notion of authorial intention is similar to that of Hirsch: authorial meaning for Derrida is
not recoverable because stable meaning itself is not recoverable from anything. Irvin (2006)
similarly distinguishes intentionalism (the author’s psychology at the moment of
composition) from conventionalism (the linguistic rules of a culture at a historical moment).

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She finds fault with both as mutually excluding aspects of the other, and presents a
hypothetical intentionalism as a possible solution to both. Here, a competent reader imagines
an idealized author, on the basis of textual evidence and any other information that a reader
might possess. The notion that authorial intention can be located as a model within the
reader is a phenomenological position that was adopted by the Geneva School linguists,
notable Georges Poulet (1969). For him, the critic’s task involves establishing a sense of the
authorial consciousness, on the basis not only of the literary work in hand, but also on any
other available textual and cultural knowledge. Across all of these approaches, almost all of
the critical theory seems to have been primarily interested in validating a meta- theoretical
position. Statements about what should or should not be available to literary critics are not
only founded on a prescriptive sense, but are concerned solely with scholarly criticism rather
than accounting descriptively for what natural readers do. When ‘readers’ are discussed, they
tend to be idealized and schematized, rather than treated, for example, as sociolinguistic
communities of actual people. When authors are invoked it is either as actual historical
persons, who are inaccessible, or as historical artefacts that can be objectif ed and recovered,
or also as idealizations of ‘authorness’. All the various categories of ideal author, perfect
author, ideal reader, implied author, implied reader and so on are idealizations of either
authorness or readerliness (see Searle 1994).

Taking a more descriptive approach – drawn from its roots in applied linguistics – the field of
stylistics has in the past abided by the prohibition on both authorial intention and readerly
psychology. The focus was traditionally on the text itself. However, in recent years stylistics
has shifted to include an interest in pragmatic context and interpretation , and a cognitive
poetics has emerged that has seen the ‘affective fallacy’ largely abandoned (Brône and
Vandaele 2009; Gavins and Steen 2003; Stockwell 2002; Tsur 2008). By contrast, stylisticians
still generally eschew any suggestion of authorial presumption or biographical criticism. This
has meant that stylistics has not directly addressed issues of creative intention, other than
phenomenologically as stylistic ‘choice’. However, the stylistician is faced with a challenge
here. Not only have literary critics continued to discuss intention with a variety of degrees of
rigour, but – perhaps more importantly – non- academic, ‘civilian’ readers commonly treat
literary works as having some sort of access to authorial lives. Civilian readers tend
overwhelmingly to read contemporary fiction by living authors (Amazon’s bestsellers in
September 2014 featured only living authors until we get to John Steinbeck at number 54,
followed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee; Waterstones similarly has Steinbeck at 55 (in
a study edition), with Charles Dickens at 62 and Robert Louis Stevenson at 87 – all preceded
by the likes of Donna Tartt, Ian McEwan, George R. R. Martin, Haruki Murakami, John
Grisham and so on). These living authors are accessible not only through their fiction but
also through magazine, television and online interviews: they are visible and fully realized
people, so it is not surprising that an easy connection is made between their artistic outputs
and their imagined interior lives. If this is the familiar author– reader situation, it is
furthermore not surprising when readers impute intentions easily to dead authors from
history as well.2

There are two sides to the concept of authorial intention: one, what did the author mean to
write? and two, what did the author mean by what he or she wrote? (these have been
defined by Peter L. Shillingsburg as "intention to do" and "intention to mean" respectively).
The first of these has traditionally been the field of textual, and the second, of literary
criticism.

Subjectivity/ objectivity in text interpretation

Hirsch “In defense of the author”

R. Barthes “The Death of the Author”

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