Authorial intent#New Criticism

As intentional fallacy or intentionalistischer fallacy (English intentional fallacy ) is in the literary theory of New Criticism an approach referred to texts, which aims to reconstruct the intention (intention) of the author when writing the work.

The intentional fallacy is to be distinguished from the intensional fallacy.

The concept of the intentional fallacy goes back to the essay The Intentional Fallacy, the WK Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published in 1946. It is also found its classical formulation:

" [ ... ] The design or intention of the author is neither available nor Desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art"

" [ ... ] The purpose or intention of the author is as a standard of judgment of a literary work neither available nor desirable. "

Such an " intentionalist " interpretation was the New Critics as a fallacy because they understood ontologically as the literary work of art in itself, autonomous textual system that had to be interpreted from itself. This view represented a break with since the beginning of the academic literature in the 19th century had dominated up to the 1920s approach, pointing the texts to their historical, biographical, and linguistic history ( philological ) work context.