John Barton on the "New Critics" in Biblical Studies and the Question of Authorial Intent

New critics, structuralists and proponents of ‘canon criticism’ all agree that the essential flat in asking about the intentions of an author, rather than about the inherent meaning of a text, is that to do so is to abandon literary criticism for psychology. A question about intention is a question about the state of someone’s mind. Now ‘intention’ is an enormous issue in philosophy, which we cannot go into detail here. But it does seem reasonable to ask whether the matter is really as simple as New Criticism makes it. Surely questions about intention need not be so crudely psychologistic as to lead automatically to speculations about the author’s ‘inner life’. At the level of ordinary language usage, most people can distinguish the questions ‘What did the poet mean by saying X?’ from the two questions ‘What was passing through the poet’s mind when he wrote X?’ and ‘What psychological or emotional state was the poet in when he wrote X?’ . . . It is true [that] Wimsatt and Beardsley [authors who warned against committing the “Intentionalist Fallacy”] did not say a work’s meaning was not the meaning the author intended: they said that certain ways of trying to establish what he meant – ‘extrinsic’ ways, involving evidence other than the text itself – were illicit. Nonetheless, if this doctrine is applied rigorously, it does tend to suggest that to talk of intention is necessarily to invoke external factors like psychology and emotion. In any case, it is not clear why anti-intentionalism should be applied as an absolute dogma. What we can know about the author from sources other than the text itself is not a criterion of the text’s meaning, certainly; but it can still provide useful hints as to what the text is likely to mean. There seems to be no reason why Old Testament scholars should take this aspect of the New Criticism, valid though it may be within reasonable limits, as placing an absolute embargo on questions about the biblical writers’ intentions – as though this would inevitably lead to some kind of ‘Romantic’ theory of biblical inspiration. This absurdly exaggerates the perils latent in ‘intentionalism.’ (John Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984], 168, 169; comments in square brackets added for clarification; italics in original)

 For more, see: William Dever vs. Postmodernist Approaches to Written Texts and Artifacts