In this master essay, Wimsatt and Beardsley call out readers who just go through texts hoping to figure out what their authors really meant. According to these guys, authorial intent is not the most important thing about a text. What is important is the text itself—and its magical stew of literary devices and structures. (Double, double, toil and trouble…)
Clearly, W&B's argument against trying to get inside an author's head is pretty controversial. Do you think an author's intention is important to understanding a text?
If Stephenie Meyer claimed that Twilight was actually a political novel dressed up as a vampire romance, would you believe her? Would her ideas about what she meant mean more than all of her readers' notions about her stories?
What if Rebecca Black came forward—in a serious version of what others have done only in parody—to say that "Friday" was, like, totally deep? Would you trust the author over your own reading (or listening)? If not, how would you argue against him or her, using your own close reading of the work?
Wimsatt and Beardsley use T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land as an example of why it's important to delineate between the author's mind and the poem as it exists. In one version, Eliot actually gave footnotes to the poem, explaining where he got the different allusions he uses in the piece.
According to W&B, should we pay attention to these footnotes? Are they important to the poem (maybe even part of the poem, since Eliot included them), or are they just a distraction from the text itself?