Beyond the author: how meaning is made in English Literature
Beyond the author: how meaning is made in English Literature
Close reading is the core skill A-level rewards, but it rests on a question it rarely answers. Where does a text's meaning actually come from: the author, the words on the page, or the reader? The strongest applicants can think about this.
A-level English Literature teaches close reading, the patient attention to how a text is made that we describe in our guides to unseen poetry and to building an argument in an essay. It is the right foundation. But close reading rests on an assumption that criticism has argued about for a century, and noticing the argument is part of what separates a capable student from an interesting one.
The assumption is that a text has a meaning, and that our job is to find it. The natural next question is where that meaning lives. Most students, without being told to, locate it in the author: the writer intended something, and reading is the recovery of that intention. It is an intuitive view. It is also one that a great deal of twentieth-century criticism set out to complicate, and the reasons are worth knowing.
The problem with intention
In 1946 two American critics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, gave the difficulty a name: the intentional fallacy. Their argument was that the author's private intention is neither available to us nor the right standard for judging what a poem means. We do not have access to what Keats meant, only to the words he left, and those words may do more, or other, than he consciously planned. The poem is a made object of language, and its meaning is a property of the object rather than a message we reconstruct by imagining the writer's mind. This was the founding move of the approach known as New Criticism, and it is why your teachers steer you away from writing about what the poet was feeling.
The reader's part
If meaning is not simply deposited by the author, one further possibility is that the reader helps to make it. Critics such as Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish argued that a text is not complete until it is read, that it leaves gaps the reader fills, and that interpretation is an activity rather than a retrieval. Roland Barthes put the provocation most sharply in a short essay from 1967, announcing the death of the author and the birth of the reader, by which he meant that a text is a space of many meanings that no single authorial intention can close down. You do not have to accept the whole of this to feel its force in front of an unseen poem, where there is no author to consult and you must build a reading from the words alone.
Interpretation is not a free-for-all
None of this means that any reading is as good as any other, and it is a serious misunderstanding to think it does. The text constrains interpretation. Some readings are better supported by the evidence of the words than others, and the whole discipline consists in making a case that the text will bear. What these critical movements change is not whether an interpretation can be wrong, but what a good interpretation is arguing about. They shift the question from what the writer meant to what this arrangement of language does, and what effect it produces, and that is a question you answer with evidence rather than biography.
Why this helps at A-level
The practical payoff is immediate. It explains why "the writer is trying to say" is a weak formulation and why "the poem enacts, through its broken syntax, the collapse it describes" is a strong one. The first guesses at a mind you cannot see. The second makes a claim about the text that you can support or challenge. Thinking about where meaning comes from turns analysis into argument, which is precisely the move from the middle bands to the top ones.
For applicants to English, this is the reading that shows a mind already at work on the questions the subject asks. A good primer is Terry Eagleton's introduction to literary theory, which sets out these debates accessibly, and our recommended reading lists several more. If you would like to build this habit of thought into your own writing, it is at the centre of our English Literature tutoring.
