ENGL 251A Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Authorial Intent, Public Knowledge

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: English
• Course: ENGL 251A
• Professor: David- Antoine Williams

Document Summary

Intentional fallacy: the concept of attempting to interpret the intention of the author. It"s impossible to know the intention of the author. Even if you called the author to ask them, their intention now is only a memory for them of their intention at the time. It is not even fully accessible to them. Humans are inherently de-coders we attempt to look for meaning in works. The practical messages are more abstract than poetry . In order to understand the practical messages of poetry, we must manipulate the poetry to extract a message from it. The poem just is nothing has to be done to it, it simply must be read. The internal (that is, of the poem) is also public, because it is written in the common language of the public and is therefore accessible to everyone. The internal is discovered through semantics and syntax.