authorialintent

Authorial intent refers to the intended meaning, purpose, or message that a creator aims to communicate through a work. In traditional literary criticism, understanding the author’s goals was often seen as essential to interpretation. Critics sought biographical or contextual information to reconstruct what the author meant to express.

The concept has been central to debates about how meaning should be inferred. The intentional fallacy, a term coined by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, argued that a text should be judged by its own evidence rather than by external statements about the author’s aims. Roland Barthes’s later claim that the author is irrelevant to meaning—the Death of the Author—further shifted emphasis toward the reader and the text itself.

Two broad orientations emerged. Intentionalist or author-centric approaches attempt to reconstruct the author’s intended meaning and treat it as a guide to interpretation. Anti-intentionalist or reader-centric approaches argue that texts generate meanings through linguistic structures and reader responses, with context and culture shaping interpretation. Between these extremes, some scholars treat authorial intent as a relevant but not definitive factor, balancing textual analysis with knowledge of the author’s aims when available.

Beyond literature, authorial intent is discussed in film, music, and other media, where production collaboration and multiple creators complicate singular intention. In contemporary scholarship, intent is usually treated as one source of evidence among others, rather than a sole determinant of a work’s meaning.