In discussing changing roles of authors and readers on the “read-write web,” I’ve raised the notion of intentional fallacy. Before I post something on next week’s readings, I think it may be useful to point to some readings on this topic. The phrase is commonly attributed to Wimsatt and Beardsly, who wrote an essay on the subject about the same year Vannevar Bush was musing about the “memex.” Their article is available via UBC VPN on JSTOR here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676

Another key article related to this topic, of course, is “Death of the Author” (Barthes, 1968). Here’s an excerpt (one can easily find the whole thing through a Google Scholar search):

“. . . a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. . . . Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1968).

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1968. Trans. Richard Howard. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill, 1986. 49-55.

In asking students to determine authorial intention, it might be argued that instructors attempt to assume the authorial mantle of power. Meantime, the “birth of the reader,” as Barthes terms it, has given rise to a new school of criticism: “reception” or “reader response” theory (e.g., Hans Robert Jauss), and the question that has been raised by some English educators in light of this trend is “does the empowerment of the reader result in the subversion of serious literary criticism and lay the ground for an ‘anything goes’ style of response?” If so, where does that leave the teacher of literature, who is no longer positioned as the keeper of knowledge about literary texts and instead seems poised to be the mediator of response?

In fact, the debate isn’t very far removed from questions arising in education circles in relation to how social media and folksonomic trends in knowledge creation and distribution are displacing traditional didactic models of teaching.