A promise kept

I told professor Graban I'd relate intentional fallacy to Bakhtin.  Here we go. Allow me to define intentional fallacy as described in the Bedford Glossary:

"The practice of basing interpretations on the expressed or implied intentions of authors...the critic's task is to show what is actually in the text, not what an author intended to put there" (Murfin and Ray 246).

Holy Cow.  This totally relates to Bakhtin.  My last post mentioned heteroglossia--the "double-voiced discourse" in the novel that reiterates the notion of utterances:  what we say versus what we mean versus how we take it.

Intentional fallacy wants to combat this tendency by removing the "implied intentions of authors" and focusing only on what's actually written in the text.  I find the problematic because, while they believe that it's not about "what the author intended to put there," they still must interpret the text within their own language.  Therefore, a lawyer reading Hemingway isn't the same as a child reading Hemingway--even if they don't focus on the "intentions" of the author they're still making interpretations based on text.  But we all read texts differently.  Which means the critic, in a way, becomes the author.  It's not what the author says, but what the critic means and how the reader takes it.