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Not Literally

Not Literally

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In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work.

Long time literary theory has held that the main authority for any piece of writing comes from the author's intent when writing it, in which all other views or interpretations are secondary to the author's intent.

New Criticism, as espoused by Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, T. S. Eliot, and others, argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." The author, they argue, cannot be reconstructed from a writing -- the text is the primary source of meaning, and any details of the author's desires or life are secondary. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that even details about the work's composition or the author's intended meaning and purpose that might be found in other documents such as journals or letters are "private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact" and are thus secondary to the trained reader’s rigorous engagement with the text itself.

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