The authorial fallacy: what literary theory, Roald Dahl, Donald Trump, and artificial intelligence have in common

Abstract

In 1943, the literary theorist, William Wimsatt, and the philosopher of art and aesthetics, Monroe Beardsley, produced an entry for ‘Intention’ in Joseph T Shipley’s Dictionary of World Literature. It is notable that this somewhat revolutionary entry was written at a time of World War and intense scrutiny and criticism of populist rhetoric and cults of personality. At the same time, this critical re-examination of authorial intent was somewhat startling to the dominant traditions of textual interpretation: ‘There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic’s approach will not be qualified by his view of “intention”.’ It was also a significant departure from the immutability of the literary canon and critics like FR Leavis who determined an elite tradition and delivered a type of literary criticism that self-consciously rendered a classist account of authors and readers alike. After the War, in 1946, Wimsatt and Beardsley published their longer treatment of the question of intention in the now famous essay, The Intentional Fallacy, where they maintain that the author’s intention is ‘not a part of the work as a linguistic fact’, it is external and therefore ‘private and idiosyncratic’. The work is also contingent, historical, and situated: ‘In the course of years a work may undergo a shift in meaning in some of its words, so that one may have to distinguish between the work “then” and the work “now”.’ In the original and brief dictionary entry,