Our readings last week on New Criticism and this week’s readings on Reader Response focus on the text and the response of the reader to the text, respectively. There are a few similarities that can be pointed out including, as Tompkins argues in her conclusion, the assumption that meaning is the ultimate goal of criticism. Whether because it is irrelevant or unknowable, another assumption that New Criticism and Reader Response seem to share is a disregard for authorial intent.

This disregard for intent has been percolating at the back of my mind since the beginning of the class, and indeed even before. I understand the rationales given by both New Criticism and Reader Response for disregarding it, but it doesn’t seem to correspond to the daily lived realities of attempting to understand human communication. I say that because in so many other areas of human interaction and communication, intent matters a great deal. I’ll take up one such example below.

In this clip from season six of The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick and her law partner Cary Agos are representing a client that is suing a neighbor for patent infringement. The accused has been “saving seeds” from year to year, a process which is illegal if the seeds are patented. Both clients have decided to resolve the measure in binding “Christian Arbitration,” which is a mechanism for binding arbitration in civil suits outside of court, which revolves around Christian principles.  It’s an unusual setting for legal arbitration, but it articulates some of the questions about intent that haunt our legal system. In this clip, both lawyers argue over the role of intent. Does authorial intent matter? Or is it merely the ramifications of those actions that matter? Is someone breaking the law if they are ignorant of the law?

The answer of whether intent matters becomes complicated, both yes and no. And it is complicated in our legal system. For example, our legal system makes a distinction between premeditated murder, murder, and manslaughter. While the resulting loss of life is constitutive of a crime, the consequences for that crime are contingent upon intent. The law is concerned with intent and authorial knowledge. What did the author know? What was intended to be conveyed?

We measure intent within our legal system because we believe there is an ethical and moral difference between accidentally hitting someone with your car and plotting their demise. Can you imagine a legal system in which intent was irrelevant? If hitting someone with your car automatically meant life in prison? Intent is not simply a utilitarian calculation (if someone commits pre-meditated murder, they are more likely to do it again), it judges intent as being intrinsic to the meaning within the act itself.

Within the legal system, we believe that authorial intent can be discovered through an interpretive community, through a preponderance of evidence and through the hermeneutic of presumed innocence. The advocates involved in the case bring evidence of intent before the interpretive community (jury). This could be compromised of things such as eye witnesses, character witnesses, “hard” evidence, and the author themselves might take the stand to explain their interpretation of their own actions.

I understand that it is more difficult within the realm of criticism to weigh authorial intent. However, I am curious about the divide between what we believe we can or should measure in our material lives, and what we believe we can or should measure in criticism. Why is it that authorial intent is intrinsic to understanding the meaning of a death, and not the meaning of a work of literature? While a case of manslaughter may be interpreted by the “reader” with the same force as a pre-meditated murder, does that change the meaning of the act? Or is there something about authorial intent that is, in fact, intrinsic to the meaning of the action. If this is so, why are we in such a hurry to leave the author behind and what are the ethical implications for doing so?

The goal for criticism is to specify meaning. That was a major take away I gleaned from the reading for this week. Jane Tompkins’ essay, to conclude the collection, states that as a goal specifically and the other essays affirm that assertion (p. 201). I find this a provocative position. It offers the critic a very meaningful place in society. Arriving at meaning is a complex feat. This particular approach seems especially complex and requires a unique demand on the critic to go outside of the text, not only for context, but for the response of the reader. Full stop. Which reader? There were several interpretations offered by the various authors represented in the collection. For example, Walker Gibson proposes that the critic think about the “real” and the “mock” reader. Gerald Prince offers categories of the “real” reader, the “virtual” reader, and the “ideal” reader. Michael Riffaterre offers the concept of the “superreader” in order to analyze the meaning and effect of a poem. There are three separate ways to think about the reader, how is a critic to choose? Nearly all of the essays remove the author and their intentions from the equation of meaning. The context of the literature and history did not seem to need to be accounted for either. Jonathan Culler is the only one who seems to get us close to understanding context because readers make meaning based on publicly agreed upon conventions. One thing is certain, the realm of meaning resides in the reader’s mind.

There is also an intriguing moral and identity bend to this line of thinking. Reading offers the possibility of transcendence for Georges Poulet. In fact, the work “constitutes itself” inside the reader according to Poulet (p. 47). The reader gives life to the text. Reading leads to fuller knowledge of the Self and extends the creation of the Self for Wolfgang Iser. Meaning dwells in the mind of the reader for Stanley Fish. Norman Holland states, “Each reader, in effect, re-creates the work in terms of his own identity theme” (p. 126). Which implies that an identity can be surmised by the way in which a reader re-creates meaning and fantasy in a piece of literature.

At first blush, I assumed I would need to be a mind reader in order to do this Reader-Response form of criticism. Entering the mind of the reader is the task prescribed. How will I know what a reader thinks of a text? And, won’t every reader have their own thoughts about a text? Sure, there will be overlap here and there. But, really. How do I account for effects and results of a text? Diving into the mind of the reader seems to be a dangerous task for the critic. Is this approach only appropriate for literature? There are no examples offered in this volume that go outside of the realm of literature as the text. There is a lot riding on the reader and the critics ability to go into the mind of the reader in order to specify meaning. Yet none of the essays told me how to do this. Hopefully on Monday we can hash some of this out.

What is the relationship between criticism and history? Between interpretation and fact? Or, as rhetorical critics would have it, between text and context? These questions, in particular, resonated with me because they center around my main anxiety as I approach my text for this course: what does my fascination with the text’s context have to do with the analysis of the text? I have chosen two anthropological “community reports” on “White-Indian-Black” relations in Robeson County, North Carolina. These reports, commissioned by the Rockefeller Institute, are some of the only documents that government officials could have used in the early 20th century to better understand the county’s complex dynamics. The texts initially interested me precisely because they helped me better understand the larger institutional context surrounding the 1960s/1970s civil rights movements in that same county. But, what role does the broader historical context–both before and after the text’s production–play in the analysis of the text, and does my fascination with the text’s context constitute enough legitimacy to submit the text to a “close reading”?

Before this weeks’ readings, I would have assumed New Critics would provide me with a quick, dismissive response. The New Critics were not, however, the naive formalists that I originally assumed. Many New Critics argued over the relationship between a text’s inner dynamics and the “outer world.” Does a text tell us about our personal psychology, feelings, ideology, history? Wimsatt Jr., for instance, begins in the final essay of The Verbal Icon, by describing the relationship between history and criticism as a complex and “problematic relationship.” Wimsatt Jr. identifies four distinct ways in which historical data can inform, expand, or distort a textual analysis. I think two of his distinctions were especially useful and important for critics to consider deeply: historical data as “antecedent” (supporting an understanding of the text’s origin) and historical data as “meaning” of a text (260). Far from ignoring the historical dimensions to textual analysis, Wimsatt Jr. speculated on the benefits and perils of using historical information in these different ways. He concedes that the text is made possible only through history, but emphasizes that every analysis and every critic is structured by the current historical context. Thus, even though I am fascinated with the historical context surrounding my text as antecedent, my own historical context is equally important to consider. An unchecked enthusiasm about a text’s historical context could easily lead into an “intentional” or “affective” fallacy and subsume the internal economy of a text under a personal bias or moral position. Perhaps Richards was not completely wrong in suggesting that a large part of a textual interpretation involves grappling with the reader’s cognitive biases. 

I think there is something to be said that if a critic believes a text to be a rich and relevant artifact of a larger historical context then the text deserves to be analyzed, in part, on its own terms. Critics, informed by a given historical context, should mine a text for its various textual dynamics and then use the historical data related to it as a way to further understand and perhaps challenge initially biased interpretations. In this way, critics can adequately heed Wimsatt Jr’s warning that “the personal interest is not the critical” (265). What do you all think, especially in regards to your own writing projects? How do we determine if a text is suitable for a close textual analysis, and how do we try to connect larger contextual matters to our interpretation? Is every “good” close reading the product of a back-and-forth interpretation between text and contexts, both past and present? In short, how do you plan on incorporating your text’s historical context into your analysis?