Rather, if we apply the ideas of the literary theorist John Farrell (The Varieties of Authorial Intention: Literary Theory beyond the
Intentional Fallacy [Cham: Macmillan, 20171, esp.
Kelly's view that the omission of Curio, who is already absent from Shakespeare, is "designed to bring the Antony-icon closer to the paradigm" (65) comes close to being a kind of
intentional fallacy in service to ideology.
Despite drawing on McGrath's biographical background (setting hoary New Critical dogma aside, she recognizes how impossible it is to read McGrath without acknowledging, for example, the importance of his experience as the child of a superintending psychiatrist at Broadmoor) and his own critical views, Zlosnik manages to avoid falling prey to
intentional fallacy. She scrupulously balances McGrath's statements with her own interpretive convictions, which are marked by an evident familiarity with the (surprisingly sparse) critical literature on McGrath's fiction.
Literary critics WK Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley famously argued in their book The Verbal Icon (1954) that it was a mistake (which they termed the "
intentional fallacy") to assume that a work is properly interpreted by knowing the intention of the author.
formalist focus on the text itself," which Kinderman sees as growing out of attempts to avoid "the socalled
intentional fallacy." The literary critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley famously argued in an article first published in 1946 that "...
I tried, and repeatedly failed, to avoid the
intentional fallacy. I'd see a pattern that looked like Rothko, or Richter, or Miro, and think, "Ah, I get what he's doing there." But these weren't allusions; they were accidents.
An Expressionist interpretation of The War lapses immediately into
intentional fallacy, which in this case misconstrues Dix's biography.
Cheer as he brushes aside allegorical analysis of Tolkien (41) and literally responds "phooey" to critics of the so-called "
intentional fallacy" (57).
Mazer observes that since the ascent of New Criticism, literary critics have designated the attempt to discern the author's original intention as the "
intentional fallacy." In contrast, stage-centered scholars want to understand what the dramatist envisioned.