SHAKSPER 2001: Authorial Intention

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 03/06/01 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0529  Tuesday, 6 March 2001

From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
Date:           Monday, 5 Mar 2001 18:28:55 -0500
Subject:        Authorial Intention

R. A. Cantrell writes that what I referred to as the "taboo on reference
to authorial intention" has by now been "rendered vestigial."

Do you have a good source for this position that I can present to one of
the members of my orals committee?

Manuela Rossini points out that:

>the author need not have implicitly and
>consciously addressed incest. But a critic who reads symptomatically
>would be interested in digging this "absent presence" out as the text's
>problematic; that is, by making visible what is/has to stay invisible.

I perfectly understand, and I was really just looking for the Montrose
citation, but, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the issue has
recently come up in trying to revise my dissertation proposal to the
satisfaction of the literary theorist on my orals committee, and it's
forcing me to do a lot of dancing around what I really want to say,
which involves a positive statement about Shakespeare's literary
project.  Do you happen to know if there is anything analogous to the
"death of the author" in art criticism?  A course I took last semester
in Art of the Italian Renaissance spent a lot of time discussing the
artists' biographies, political affiliations, sexual proclivities, etc.
in an attempt to decode their works.

Just wondering:

Clifford Stetner
CUNY
http://phoenix.liu.edu/~cstetner/cds.html


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