The argument for which statement is closer to the truth and more convincing lies in the understanding of their relationship. While the author may have had a clear and specific intention in mind when writing a text, the way a reader receives this text will be varied or not at all similar to the original intent; it may be influenced by the presence of a preface or guided by an author’s selective use of motifs and language, or maybe not at all, allowing for an independent and uninfluenced interpretation of a text.
For the argument that a text means what the author intended when they wrote it, we can say that this is true due to the common practice by many authors to include a preface before the start of their text. A notable example of this is …show more content…
The original story is ‘My Sweet Orange Tree’ by José Mauro de Vasconcelos, which centres around the story of a young boy, Zeze, who is mischievous and playful, but is also looked down on and abused by his family, but when the family moves, he befriends an orange tree in the garden of their house with which he can communicate and thusly befriends. The author has stated that his intention was to highlight the sorrow felt in adult life at the loss of childhood and onset of rationality and that love and creativity is the remedy for this misery. However, the aforementioned artist, singer/songwriter IU, in this case representing the role of the reader, interpreted the text in an entirely different way, stating that, to her, Zeze is “a character with many paradoxes, which is why I felt he was charming and sexy.” She depicts the young boy in her song lyrics as a sexual being, seemingly misinterpreting the character and the author’s intended meaning of the text altogether. The author himself has actually spoken out against her interpretation, as it is so far from his original intention. This brings up the question of whether author or reader determines the meaning of a text, as while the author may have a clear meaning in mind, they cannot prohibit readers from arriving at their own interpretations. As Barthes …show more content…
What I mean by contextual factors is the constant changing state of who is reading the text; values and ideas will change throughout time, so with each reading of a text as time progresses, the meaning will later with how the text is read and received, e.g. what might have been seen as a positive in a text when it was first created and published may be seen as a negative to modern readers due to shifts in attitudes, and as audiences change throughout time and societal values shift, it could be suggested that the interpretation of a text will thusly change as well. It can also be said that in many cases we, as modern readers, can never truly understand the author’s true intention behind meaning due to the fact that we cannot directly follow this line of enquiry, as the authors are now dead and unable to express their intentions when they set out to create the text. It is in this circumstance that it could be argued that readers are not only free, but possibly relied on, to create meaning for a text now that the author is no longer present. This is summarized in ‘Ways of reading’ by Montgomery from W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley’s essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) which states that “In most cases it is not possible to find out what the poet intended.” (Montgomery, 2007) This suggests that the true meaning and intention of the
For the argument that a text means what the author intended when they wrote it, we can say that this is true due to the common practice by many authors to include a preface before the start of their text. A notable example of this is …show more content…
The original story is ‘My Sweet Orange Tree’ by José Mauro de Vasconcelos, which centres around the story of a young boy, Zeze, who is mischievous and playful, but is also looked down on and abused by his family, but when the family moves, he befriends an orange tree in the garden of their house with which he can communicate and thusly befriends. The author has stated that his intention was to highlight the sorrow felt in adult life at the loss of childhood and onset of rationality and that love and creativity is the remedy for this misery. However, the aforementioned artist, singer/songwriter IU, in this case representing the role of the reader, interpreted the text in an entirely different way, stating that, to her, Zeze is “a character with many paradoxes, which is why I felt he was charming and sexy.” She depicts the young boy in her song lyrics as a sexual being, seemingly misinterpreting the character and the author’s intended meaning of the text altogether. The author himself has actually spoken out against her interpretation, as it is so far from his original intention. This brings up the question of whether author or reader determines the meaning of a text, as while the author may have a clear meaning in mind, they cannot prohibit readers from arriving at their own interpretations. As Barthes …show more content…
What I mean by contextual factors is the constant changing state of who is reading the text; values and ideas will change throughout time, so with each reading of a text as time progresses, the meaning will later with how the text is read and received, e.g. what might have been seen as a positive in a text when it was first created and published may be seen as a negative to modern readers due to shifts in attitudes, and as audiences change throughout time and societal values shift, it could be suggested that the interpretation of a text will thusly change as well. It can also be said that in many cases we, as modern readers, can never truly understand the author’s true intention behind meaning due to the fact that we cannot directly follow this line of enquiry, as the authors are now dead and unable to express their intentions when they set out to create the text. It is in this circumstance that it could be argued that readers are not only free, but possibly relied on, to create meaning for a text now that the author is no longer present. This is summarized in ‘Ways of reading’ by Montgomery from W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley’s essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) which states that “In most cases it is not possible to find out what the poet intended.” (Montgomery, 2007) This suggests that the true meaning and intention of the