Authority in interpretation, a note quick & crude

What is the source of authority in academic literary criticism?

Authority is in the text

The critic interprets the text without reference to authorial intention and without summoning a specific interpretive vocabulary. The text is esteemed [canonical] and the interpreted meaning is said to reside in the text. The critic’s authority comes from the text.

That was the situation of the New Criticism, which had roots before World War II and emerged to the intellectual and institutional center after the war. Textual canonicity was more or less taken as given; the cultural processes that produced it were not opened for inspection.

Alas, critics often arrived at different interpretations of the texts. How could that be? So…

Authority is in the author

The question of authorial intention was opened for interrogation. Some critics argued that authorial intention should settle the matter. One author = one intention = one meaning for a text. It is not necessary to invoke a special body of interpretive method.

Not everyone bought it. The author was elided (“death of the author”) in favor of a conception that see the texts as a nexus of intersecting systems, semiotic, power, class, race, ethnicity, gender, whatever. This gives rise to so-called Theory.

Authority is in Theory

The critic now invokes some body or bodies of intellectual practice to justify the interpretation: various flavors of psychoanalysis, various flavors of Marxist analysis, various identity criticisms, each with its own body of theory. There is no appeal to authorial intention, no need. Interpretation are authorized by Theory.

Note that since authority is no longer invested in the text or in the author, it is no longer necessary to confine critical intention to canonical intentions. The standard canon is opened up to alternative canons – the so-called canon wars – and popular culture is now a legitimate arena for inquiry.

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That’s as far as things have gone. There’s no where else to go, not in a regime where meaning is the sole center of inquiry. It’s time to look to description and to computation (in particular and this). But I need not elaborate on those in this post. They’re all over New Savanna.