Victory for TEWWW EWWW?? Snape the hero

[leslie41]

No: HPFGUIDX 173284

> Alla:
> 
> Who makes the determination though that authoritarial intent is 
> irrelevant? Is it irrelevant because it does not support your 
> interpetation or is it irrelevant for any other reasons?

Well, it's a free country, and everyone has the right to believe 
anything they like!  So of course me saying that "authorial intent is 
irrelevant" doesn't mean you have to believe it too.  

I say it because I am actually an English professor with a Ph.D. in 
literature, who has been teaching full time and publishing for 
seventeen years.  I say it as an editor of three books of literary 
criticism.  

Those that utilize authorial intent in their criticism usually only 
do so for curiosity's sake, or as an aside. There is a subset of 
literary critics that may do more than that, but the vast majority of 
them realize that authorial intent is meaningless.  There are many 
reasons for this, some of them practical, and some not so.  Firstly, 
in most cases we don't have any idea of what the "authorial intent" 
actually is.  We may not even (as in the case with texts that I 
routinely teach, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and Sir Gawain and the Green 
Knight) even know the identity of the author at all.  If we know who 
the author is we may have sketchy knowledge of him or her, or have no 
surviving authorial opinion on their own text.  But let's put that 
aside and say that in such cases where we *do* have authorial 
opinion, we should perforce take it seriously.

No, no, and no.  The author's opinions should only be taken seriously 
if and when they jibe with the actual text itself.  Many authors 
underrate their own work and on their deathbeds actually demand that 
it be destroyed (Virgil was one of these; there are others).  Many 
repudiate it (Chaucer was one of these).  In many other cases we have 
testaments from authors about characters in which we see that the 
author's view of the characters does not jibe with the character on 
the page (Joyce was one of these).

And, er...authors lie.  Authors often tell themselves and others what 
they think is there instead of what actually is there.  Again, the  
parent/child relationship of an author to text to me seems to 
indicate that whatever they say about the text should be immediately 
viewed as suspect, as suspect as any other person's opinion of the 
text until it has been proven with thoughtful, supported textual 
analysis.

Yes, of course this is just my honest opinion. And my honest opinion 
is no better than anyone else's, despite my degrees and my 
experience, unless I can support it.  

But if you are asking why authorial intent is irrelevant, *that*, 
because of my training and my experience, I am certainly in a 
position to know and to explain.

Take it or leave it, as you wish.