Intentions In The Experience Of Meaning

This volume examines the role that authorship plays in people's experience of language and art as meaningful human artifacts.

Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions: Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of J.R. Searle (Foundations of Communication and Cognition).

The relationship between an author's and an audience's intentions is complex but need not preclude mutual engagement. This philosophical investigation challenges existing literary and rhetorical perspectives on intention and offers a new framework for understanding the negotiation of meaning. It describes how an audience's intentions affect their interpretations, shows how audiences negotiate meaning when faced with a writer's undecipherable intentions, and defines the scope of understanding within rhetorical situations. Introducing a concept of intention into literary analysis that supersedes existing rhetorical theory, Arabella Lyon shows how the rhetorics of I. A. Richards, Wayne Booth, and Stanley Fish, as well as the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, fail to account for the complex interactions of author and audience. Using Kenneth Burke's concepts of form, motive, and purpose, she builds a more complex notion of intention than those usually found in literary studies, then employs her theory to describe how philosophers read Wittgenstein's narratives, metaphors, and reversals in argument. Lyon argues that our differences in intention prevent consistency in interpretations but do not stop our discussions, deliberations, and actions. She seeks to acknowledge difference and the communicative problems it creates while demonstrating that difference is normal and does not end our engagement with each other. Intentions combines recent work in philosophy, literary criticism, hermeneutics, and rhetoric in a highly imaginative way to construct a theory of intention for a postmodern rhetoric. It recovers and renovates central concepts in rhetorical theory—not only intention but also deliberation, politics, and judgment.

The scholarly debate about authorship has not only transcended all aspects of literary studies, but has also prompted contemporary authors to counter, subvert, and challenge it. One author to whom this applies in particular is Milan Kundera. In this study, Christine Knoop re-examines Kundera's essayistic and novelistic work against the background of the theoretical paradigms of literary authority, intention, and ownership. In so doing, she demonstrates how he overcomes traditional theoretical distinctions by postulating the existence of both a strong, powerful author figure and of potentially boundless literary meaning. Kundera's radically ambiguous conception of the author in the novel, developed primarily to influence the reader, is discussed and developed to cast new light on the critical debate about authorship at large while maintaining his primary conjecture that authorship as such is perpetually hybrid, dynamic, and unfinished. Christine Angela Knoop is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for Comparative Literature at Freie Universitat Berlin.

This multidisciplinary study explores how people make sense of each other's actions.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: In "The Task of the Translator", Walter Benjamin sets forth what he believes to be the true goal of any work of translation. Instead of conforming to the reader, a translation should conform to the source and target language of the work, the purpose of which is to expose the relationship between the two languages, how each complements the other in its use. But is there more to Benjamin's Task than that? Walter Benjamin is commonly thought of as a Neukantianer because of his influence by the Marburger school, especially Cohen. Little is known, however, about his influence by Husserl's school of phenomenology. In this paper, we will determine Benjamin's influence by phenomenology by first developing a concise conception of intentionality based on a close reading of Husserl's principle work Logische Untersuchungen, as intentionality is the key term linking Benjamin to the phenomenological tradition. We will then provide a novel interpretation of Benjamin's essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" by focusing on his use of the phenomenological term 'intention' and, with help of Benjamin's fragments on the philosophy of language—where he also used the term intention in the phenomenological sens, provide a novel understanding of what Benjamin means by "das Gemeinte" and "die Art des Meinens" with respect to his theory of translation.