what the author meant

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a phrase used in literary discussion to describe the interpretive question of authorial intention — what the writer consciously or unconsciously sought to communicate through their work — and the long-running critical debate about whether this question is answerable, relevant, or even legitimate; traditional literary criticism placed great weight on recovering authorial intention as the gold standard of correct interpretation, but the New Critics' doctrine of the intentional fallacy argued that a text's meaning is determined by its words as they function in context, not by what the author privately intended; Roland Barthes's essay The Death of the Author went further, arguing that the attribution of fixed meaning to the author's intention closes down the productive plurality of meaning that texts generate for readers; contemporary criticism navigates between these positions, acknowledging that authorial context matters while recognising that texts exceed and sometimes contradict their authors' stated purposes