Authorial Intention, Purposive Interpretation, and the Incoherence of Strong Textualism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Authorial Intention

Letter versus Spirit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Camper
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Textual Meaning

Chapter 4 turns its attention to the stasis of letter versus spirit. Traditionally, this stasis has been understood as pitting the exact words of a text against the author’s intent, but the chapter expands the notion of spirit to include other animating forces of textual meaning, such as an overarching principle of interpretation brought by readers to the text. The chapter shows how both the letter and spirit of a text can be divided, with arguers disputing the text’s real versus apparent letter or the author’s real versus apparent intent. To demonstrate how arguers construe authorial intention for their own ends, the chapter analyzes the controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign over the “God damn America” sound bite extracted from a sermon preached by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s then-pastor. Critics dismissed Wright’s defense of his intentions, pointing to the sermon’s exact wording as evidence of his, and by extension Obama’s, anti-Americanism.

Intentionalist Strategies of Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Stock
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Gregory Currie ◽  
Ordinary Case ◽  
Unreliable Narration ◽  
Fictional Truth

This chapter addresses the complaint that extreme intentionalism standardly forces the reader who engages in interpretation to posit private, or hidden, authorial intentions, for which she has little or no evidence. It is first argued that there are no automatic strategies of interpretation of fictional content: at every stage, whether or not a given interpretative strategy is to be appropriately applied depends on the presence of relevant authorial intention as a sanction. (This section includes a discussion, and rejection, of the views of David Lewis and Gregory Currie about fictional truth; a discussion of the relevance of genre to fictional content; and a consideration of the issue of unreliable narration for an intentionalist view.) The foregoing material on strategies of interpretation is then used to show that it is false to think of the extreme intentionalist as being committed to ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ meanings in the ordinary case.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Siraganian
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Citizens United ◽  
Corporate Personhood ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Creative Writers

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

Biblical Criticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Briggs
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Interpretive Method ◽  
Interpretive Practices ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Impact

The Bible as a text can be read with or without reference to its compilation as a theologically constructed collection of sacred Jewish and Christian books. When read without such framing concerns, it may be approached with the full range of literary and theoretical interpretive tools and read for whatever purpose readers value or wish to explore. Less straightforwardly, in the former case where framing concerns come into play, the Bible is both like and unlike any other book in the way that its very nature as a “canon” of scripture is related to particular theological and religious convictions. Such convictions are then in turn interested in configuring the kinds of readings pursued in certain ways. Biblical criticism has undergone many transformations over the centuries, sometimes allowing such theological convictions or practices to shape the nature of its criticism, and at other times—especially in the modern period—tending to relegate their significance in favor of concerns with interpretive method, and in particular questions about authorial intention, original context, and interest in matters of history (either in the world behind the text, or in the stages of development of the text itself). From the middle of the 20th century onwards the interpretive interests of biblical critics have focused more on certain literary characteristics of biblical narratives and poetry, and also a greater theological willingness to engage the imaginative vision of biblical texts. This has resulted in a move toward a theological form of criticism that might better be characterized as imaginative and invites explicit negotiation of readers’ identities and commitments. A sense of the longer, premodern history of biblical interpretation suggests that some of these late 20th- and early 21st-century emphases do themselves have roots in the interpretive practices of earlier times, but that the Reformation (and subsequent developments in modern thinking) effectively closed down certain interpretive options in the name of better ordering readers’ interpretive commitments. Though not without real gains, this narrowing of interpretive interests has resulted in much of the practice of academic biblical criticism being beholden to modernist impulses. Shifts toward postmodern emphases have been less common on the whole, but the overall picture of biblical criticism has indeed changed in the 21st century. This may be more owing to the impact of a renewed appetite for theologically imaginative readings among Christian readers, and also of the refreshed recognition of Jewish traditions of interpretation that pose challenging framing questions to other understandings.

Insights for Preaching and Teaching Hebrews

2005 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-301
Author(s):  
Robert W. Canoy
Keyword(s):  
Design Pattern ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Interactive Design ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Personal Agenda

The purpose of this article is to provide a practical aid to preachers and teachers in their tasks of proclaiming Hebrews. After suggesting how proclaimers may prepare themselves to read the book, the article summarily explores the major theological themes found throughout Hebrews from the vantage point of how the themes potentially may be related through preaching and teaching. Included in the article is an exploration of some of Hebrews' challenging passages with suggestions of how to address them constructively. Proceeding from the presupposition that the document is sermonic, eschatological, and thoroughly theological, each of these is addressed throughout. The article urges that preaching and teaching done from Hebrews should be intentionally theo-logical and suggests that proclaimers should allow the text to guide the preaching and teaching that they do from it, following the interactive design pattern of exposition-exhortation. Five thematic sections are examined for homiletical insights. Although a verse-by-verse exposition is neither encouraged nor discouraged, preachers and teachers are reminded to make the very point(s) made by the writer of Hebrews and never to allow any personal agenda to take priority over authorial intention. To aid in the task of relevant preaching and teaching, sermon and lesson ideas, as well as supporting contemporary resources, are suggested.

scholarly journals Introduction: Postcolonial Reading Publics

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
British India ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Given ◽  
Discursive Context

AbstractIn this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document