In the mid-twentieth century, the proponents of New Criticism profoundly influenced literary studies by introducing the concept of the "intentional fallacy." According to this doctrine, an author’s intended meaning is fundamentally inaccessible and, more importantly, irrelevant to the objective interpretation of a literary work. For the formalist critic, the text must stand as an autonomous artifact. Any attempt to reconstruct the biographical conditions of its genesis is viewed as a distraction from the structural and semantic properties of the language itself. By excising the author from the interpretive process, New Critics sought to elevate literary analysis to a rigorous, self-contained discipline.
This formalist isolation of the text, however, invariably provoked resistance from historically minded scholars. Proponents of biographical and historical contextualism argued that language is inextricably tethered to the social realities and specific communicative intentions of its user. From this perspective, a text stripped of its authorial coordinates is rendered an ahistorical cipher. These critics contended that interpretation inherently demands an understanding of the historical author's worldview, suggesting that the formalist refusal to engage with intent not only impoverishes the reading experience but also risks profound misinterpretation by imposing modern assumptions onto historical artifacts.
More recently, the emerging field of cognitive poetics has offered a novel intervention that transcends the traditional binary of this debate. Drawing on research in cognitive science and theory of mind, cognitive poetics posits that humans possess an innate psychological compulsion to attribute intentionality to complex communicative acts. Rather than searching for an empirical historical figure, cognitive theorists argue that readers automatically construct a "virtual author" during the act of reading. This heuristic serves as an organizing principle that helps readers resolve semantic ambiguities and establish textual coherence. In this view, authorial intent is not an external fact to be excavated or ignored, but an unavoidable cognitive byproduct of narrative comprehension.
By repositioning intentionality from the realm of historical biography to the realm of reader psychology, cognitive poetics effectively reframes the foundational terms of the original dispute. It concedes to the New Critics that the actual historical author is largely inaccessible and that texts must be engaged on their own terms. Simultaneously, it validates the historical contextualists’ intuition that intentionality is indispensable to meaning-making. Ultimately, this paradigm shift suggests that while we can never definitively recover what a writer intended, the interpretive act cannot function without the cognitive illusion that someone intended something.
Which one of the following most accurately describes the organization of the passage?
- A theoretical approach to textual analysis is presented, a conventional counterargument is described, a modern framework that shifts the conceptual basis of the dispute is introduced, and the theoretical consequences of this shift are summarized.Answer
- BAn influential interpretive doctrine is outlined, an alternative method emphasizing historical context is detailed, a cognitive theory demonstrating the psychological necessity of the historical method is introduced, and the implications for literary analysis are weighed.
- CA methodological debate regarding literary meaning is introduced, the primary arguments of the opposing schools are contrasted, an empirical psychological study resolving the debate is discussed, and the superiority of the latter findings is affirmed.
- DA traditional critical fallacy is defined, the author’s objections to this definition are enumerated, a contemporary psychological model is proposed as a substitute, and the practical utility of this model for readers is assessed.
- EA formalist theory of reading is explained, the shortcomings of analyzing texts in isolation are analyzed, a cognitive mechanism utilized by readers is detailed, and the debate between formalists and their critics is definitively resolved.