48121891 Implied Author

Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald MüllerThe Implied Author

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Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller

The Implied AuthorConcept and Controversy

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Translated by Alastair Matthews

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kindt, Tom.The implied author : concept and controversy / by Tom Kindt,

Hans-Harald Müller.p. cm. � (Narratologia)

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018948-3 (alk. paper)ISBN-10: 3-11-018948-8 (alk. paper)1. Implied author (Rhetoric) I. Müller, Hans-Harald, 1943�

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200602757

ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018948-3ISBN-10: 3-11-018948-8

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Contents

Introduction: History of Criticism and the History of a Concept ... 1

Part One: Reconstructing the Concept’s History 1 Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics:

The Origins of the Implied Author Concept................................171.1 The Chicago School of Criticism

1.1.1 The Critical Turn in the Academic Study of Literature in North America.................................... 18 1.1.2 The Chicago Critics: Pluralism and Aristotelianism...................................................... 22 1.1.3 The Legacy of the Chicago School ............................. 36

1.2 Wayne C. Booth and the Implied Author Concept 1.2.1 Booth’s Combined Ethical and Rhetorical

Approach to Literary Texts ......................................... 42 1.2.2 The Implied Author and The Rhetoric of Fiction ........ 46 1.2.3 The Implied Author after The Rhetoric of Fiction ...... 56

2 Between Interpretation Theory and Narratology: The Reception of the Implied Author Concept .......................... 63 2.1 The Implied Author in Relation to Interpretation Theory

2.1.1 The Reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction ..................... 69 2.1.2 The Implied Author as the Key Concept in a Theory of Interpretation............................................ 74

2.2 The Implied Author in Relation to Interpretation and Description 2.2.1 Reception of the Concept in the Wake of Structuralism ........................................................... 84 2.2.2 The Implied Author in Relation

to Interpretation in Practice ......................................... 86 2.2.3 The Implied Author in Relation to Description......... 104

2.3 The Model Author and Other Author Models: Alternative Concepts to the Implied Author ...................... 121

2.3.1 Umberto Eco’s Model Author ................................... 1232.3.2 Wolf Schmid’s Abstract Author................................ 130 2.3.3 Wolfgang Iser’s Implied Reader ............................... 136 2.3.4 The Apparent Artist, the Fictional Author, and

the Postulated Author ................................................ 143

Part Two: Explicating the Concept

3 Exit IA? Possibilities for Explicating the Implied Author ...................... 151

3.1 The Implied Author as a Phenomenon of Reception.......... 152 3.2 The Implied Author as a Participant in Communication.... 155 3.3 The Implied Author as a Postulated Subject

Behind the Text .................................................................. 158 3.3.1 Explicating the Concept in the Context of

a Non-Intentionalistic Theory of Interpretation ........ 162 3.3.2 Explicating the Concept in the Context of

an Intentionalistic Theory of Interpretation............... 167

Abbreviations .............................................................................. 183

Works Cited................................................................................. 185

Acknowledgements ..................................................................... 225

Introduction:

History of Criticism and the History of a Concept

This book examines the concept of the implied author, a term that rose to such prominence in the wake of Wayne C. Booth’s 1961 Rhetoric of Fiction that it is still employed in the study of literature in virtually all languages today, despite the fact that it began to meet with fundamental criticism soon after Booth’s study first appeared. One might well ask what purpose is served by devoting an entire book to the history of such a concept and ending it by suggesting a new way of using it in future. It might be objected, for example, that there is no need for a critical study of the concept to proceed his-torically, as ours does, by reconstructing the different ways in which it has been used when a far less laborious alternative suggests itself. Perhaps, that is to say, an intuitive prior understanding of what is meant by the terms ‘implied’ and ‘author’ tells us enough about the kinds of objects to which they can refer to show that combining them can result only in an incongruous chimera. The expression ‘author’, proponents of this view would argue, should under no cir-cumstances be applied to objects of the kind that can be ‘implied’ in something else, for such objects are clearly not linguistic or abstract in nature. The ultimate aim of this kind of argument is to reject use of the modifier ‘implied’ with the general term ‘author’ a priori as a fatal categorial error. But, well-founded as this attack on the use of the implied author concept may be, there would be little to be gained by taking such a line in the context of the present study. At-tention has been drawn to the anomalies of the concept ever since it was introduced, but never with any effect, so it seems unlikely that anything would be achieved by showing that it is inappropriate and analytically vacuous here either. Users of the concept have simply not concerned themselves with its anomalies, and, however disputed it may be, its critics have been unable to prevent it from becoming

2 History of Criticism and the History of a Concept

one of the most successful concepts in the academic study of lit-erature in the twentieth century. This alone is reason enough to look more closely at how and why the implied author became so popular.And it is not, as we shall see, the only good reason for undertaking a careful study of the history of the concept.

The implied author is also of interest because it is not a technicalterm in the strict sense that, say, the heterodiegetic narrator is. Withthe concept, Booth drew unmistakable attention to the role of theauthor in literary communication on the one hand, while confining the author, as an implied one, to the text on the other. For this rea-son, the concept was and is inextricably bound up with the episte-mological and normative controversies about the place of the author in textual interpretation that have been rumbling on for over a hun-dred years and are still being played out today. The story of these arguments began when opposition to historicism and positivismstarted to appear at the end of the nineteenth century.1 The contro-versy reached a climax in proclamations of the death of the author,2but still shows little sign of ending, the subsequent ‘return of theauthor’ notwithstanding.3 Whether consciously or not, the debate surrounding the concept of the implied author has been and is shaped, more or less clearly, by the positions that have been adop-ted in this wider argument about authorship. Even so, the implied author is not a programmatic concept that can be used only in thecontext of a particular line of textual interpretation such as that of psychoanalysis or deconstruction. Neither programmatic nor strictly technical, it can appear in many contexts involving (the theory of) textual interpretation, as well as in related areas such as reception theory.

Our study of the implied author concept has two main objectives and is divided into two corresponding parts. Our first aim is a his-torical one: to provide a faithful reconstruction of the circum-stances, distinctive in many ways and perhaps even unique, in

1 See Kindt and Müller (2002).2 See Hix (1990), Burke (1992), and Lamarque (1996).3 See Iseminger (1992a), Jannidis et al. (1999), and Detering (2002). See also

the remarks on the debate surrounding intentionalism in 3.3 below.

Introduction 3

which the concept was introduced, and then to examine the re-sponses it has met with in the course of subsequent developments.This reconstruction of the concept’s history prepares the ground for the explication of the implied author with which the second part ofthe book is concerned. The historical study, in other words, pro-vides the background against which we put forward a more precise way of understanding the implied author concept, without thereby departing completely from the ways in which it has previously been used.4

In addition to pursuing these aims, we hope that the book will give a compelling demonstration of why the historical developmentof terms and concepts should be given proper attention in the histo-riography of scholarly activity. We hope to show that historical studies of the kind presented here can provide profound insightsinto the role of individual concepts in cultural studies, and also, on a larger scale, shed light on the construction and changing nature of the theoretical frameworks that accommodate them. Put simply,such an approach informs our understanding of the function of terms and theories in the text-based disciplines.5

The idea that theorists should always be critically aware of the concepts on which their theories and programmes depend is not new; Max Weber advocated such a position as early as the begin-

4 Quine (1951, 156) has described the process of explication as follows: ‘Anyword worth explicating has some contexts which, as wholes, are clear andprecise enough to be useful; and the purpose of explication is to preserve theusage of these favored contexts while sharpening the usage of other contexts.In order that a given definition be suitable for purposes of explication, there-fore, what is required is not that the definiendum in its antecedent usage be synonymous with the definiens, but just that each of these favored contexts of the definiendum, taken as a whole in its antecedent usage, be synonymouswith the corresponding context of the definiens.’ On explication, see alsoCarnap (1950), Quine (1960), Robinson (1968), Paw owski (1980), Danne-berg (1989b, 1991), Müller (1989), Fricke (2000), and Rey (2000).

5 Weitz (1977) provides a remarkably clear introduction to the function ofopen concepts in the humanities; regrettably, though, this work is ignored byliterary theorists in the United States today. For a detailed analysis of Weitz’position, see Carroll (2000b).


ning of the twentieth century. He was perhaps the first person to realize the true extent of the importance of concepts in culturalstudies.6 The need for such awareness is all the more pressing to-day. One programme in cultural studies gives way to the next with ever-increasing rapidity; in many cases they have lost half their au-thority in under a decade, and each leaves its own terminologicallegacy behind in its wake. The normative foundations of such sec-ond-hand terminology, as well as the theories and methods to which it is epistemologically linked, are apt to become increasingly ob-scure. It is thus of paramount importance that these contextual fac-tors be kept constantly in mind in cultural studies, or at the veryleast that they be brought periodically to mind by pausing to reflect on them. Clapped-out cars and rusty tools can be abandoned for good on the scrapheap or in a museum, if they are lucky; in cultural studies, on the other hand, there is always the chance that terms will be rediscovered and reused without warning, in circumstances im-possible to anticipate in advance.7

There are two reasons for the unpredictable destiny of program-matic terms in cultural studies. First, their names are not chosen according to the principle of ‘maximum resistance to association’,which would minimize the ‘potential for specialist terminologies tobe misunderstood’; second, their use is not controlled by ‘esoteric groups of speakers’ who have the ‘ability to ensure that the nameschosen for concepts become obligatory in terminological practice’.8Rarely do the terms of cultural studies have a fixed place and classi-fication in the binding norms of a specialist language distinct from everyday language. In many cases, in fact, there is little to set them apart from ordinary language: they are rich in connotations, par-

6 See, with references to further reading, Palonen (2000).7 See, for example, Martin (1986, 30): ‘Unlike “progressive sciences”, literary

study has never succeeded in discarding old theories because they are demon-strably less adequate than those that replace them. It is a cumulative disci-pline to which new knowledge is added, but unfashionable ideas that havelong been dormant may at any time prove their relevance to new critical con-cerns or creative methods.’

8 Lübbe (2003, 70–71).

Introduction 5

ticularly normative implications, and thus have numerous signalling functions of an appellative and persuasive nature, some latent, oth-ers less so. The resultant terminological vagueness is usually a mat-ter of regret for critical metatheorists with their interest in explicitdefinitions, but a source of gratification for sociologists—the very proximity of ordinary language to the specialist language of cultural studies makes it possible for wider social interests and ways of thinking to be carried over into cultural studies, and thus helps to preserve the connection between culture and cultural studies.9

The terminological fuzziness of concepts in cultural studies isheuristically significant in the narrower context of scholarly activityas well as in a wider social sense. Given that concepts rarely have a fixed taxonomic place in cultural studies, there are many ways in which they can be introduced into individual disciplines and even passed back and forth between them. In a way reminiscent of the expectations that accompany the transfer of methodologies,10 it ishoped in every case that the concept concerned will find the sameuse in one field of study as in the other, or at the very least some-how turn out to be useful in its new environment. Transferring con-cepts in this manner, without any certainty regarding the result, is an undertaking as risky as it is alluring, and there are striking exam-ples from the history of criticism to show it.11

The heuristic use of concepts has become increasingly importantwith the growing focus on interdisciplinarity that is now particularlyprominent in the humanities. In cultural studies especially, tradi-tional disciplinary boundaries have been broken down, or at least successfully ignored, not least under the influence of certain trends of academic politics whose followers have employed the patheticrhetoric of boundary crossings to good effect.12 Theories and meth-

9 See, with references to further reading, Kindt and Müller (2005, 339–41). Seealso Margolin (1981) on different kinds of vagueness of critical concepts.

10 See Danneberg (1989a).11 One example is discussed in Müller (1991b).12 Compare Bal (2002, 6): ‘In the wake of women’s studies, cultural studies

has, in my view, been responsible for the absolutely indispensable openingup of the disciplinary structure of the humanities. By challenging methodo-


odologies have attracted far less attention in the interdisciplinarity project than concepts,13 which have, it should be remembered, been approached more in terms of what they can do than anything else.14

Two factors are at work in the recent trend for taking the transfer of concepts to extremes: the role of concepts in the humanities has been vastly overestimated,15 and the concept of interdisciplinarity islacking real clarity.16 These are also the most frequent explanationsthat present themselves when interdisciplinary studies fail to arrive

logical dogma, and elitist prejudice and value judgment, cultural studies hasbeen uniquely instrumental in at least making the academic community awareof the conservative nature of its endeavours, if not everywhere forcing it tochange.’

13 Bal (2002, 5) describes the main thesis of Travelling Concepts as follows:‘The thesis on which this book is based, and of which it is both an elaborationand a defence, is extremely simple: namely, interdisciplinarity in the humani-ties, necessary, exciting, serious must seek its heuristic and methodologicalbasis in concepts rather than in methods’ (emphasis in original).

14 As, for example, in Bal (2002, 11): ‘While groping to define, provisionallyand partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what itcan do’ (emphasis in original).

15 This is the case in Bal (2002, 33–34): ‘In a somewhat grandiose interpreta-tion, one could say that a good concept founds a scientific discipline or field.Thus, to anticipate the subsequent specialized discussions in this book, onemight claim that the articulation of the concept of narrativity within the hu-manities and the social sciences founded the discipline of narratology. This is an inter-discipline precisely because it defines an object, a discursive modal-ity, which is active in many different fields.’

16 A one-sided understanding of Foucault has produced a way of thinking inwhich disciplines are frequently treated as social systems that defend their boundaries as privileges and hold back creative research. Recent historical studies have repeatedly demonstrated that this is, to put it mildly, an unac-ceptable generalization that obscures the actual historical situation in the de-velopment of scholarship. See, for example, Anderson and Valente (2002, 2):‘Put most succinctly: if the tendency is now to associate interdisciplinaritywith freedom, and disciplinarity with constraint, a closer look at the historyof these disciplines shows that the dialectics of agency and determinism, cur-rently distributed across the disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity divide, was atthe heart of disciplinary formation itself.’ See also Anderson and Valente(2002, 4): ‘It becomes evident, then, that disciplinarity was always interdisci-plinary.’

Introduction 7

at a common reference point, a language that would make it pos-sible to explicate concepts drawn from the languages of different disciplines. In its place, we find assorted pidgin or creole formsbeing propagated as academic lingua francas.17 It is perfectly ac-ceptable to suspend the normal requirements for explicating criticalconcepts if this is no more than a temporary measure that allows them to be transferred successfully. Explication becomes an abso-lute necessity again, however, when it comes to explaining such successes, if not before.

Our study begins by considering the genesis of the implied author concept, which, as noted above, first acquired its full terminologicalsignificance in Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction. Our analysis places the emergence of the concept in both a general historical context and a more specific epistemological one. Booth’s underlying ethical ori-entation and close connections with the programme of the Chicagoschool of criticism will have an importance place in the discussion,as will the dominant position of the New Criticism in the academicstudy of literature in America. The New Criticism was based onideas that were aesthetically specific but epistemologically indis-tinct. The New Critics saw the literary text as the sole legitimateframe of reference for work in literary studies, and unceremoniouslydismissed as fallacious any attempt to take context, particularly awork’s author and recipients, into consideration.

Our reconstruction of the concept’s introduction is intended toidentify as precisely as possible the specific contextual conditionsagainst the background of which it took shape, and also to deter-mine as clearly as possible the meaning that Booth himself associ-ated with it. Looking briefly ahead to the conclusion of our analysis, we find that Booth did not create the implied author concept in TheRhetoric of Fiction but actually introduced a cover term for severalconcepts or variants of a single concept. The Rhetoric of Fiction,that is to say, leaves open the question of whether the implied au-

17 This is the case with respect to the rhetorical turn in Thompson Klein (1996,68); for criticism of this position, see Veit-Brause (2000, 15–29).


thor is (1) an intentional product of the author in or qua the work or (2) an inference made by the recipient about the author on the basis of the work. In the first case, a further question is left open, that of whether the implied author represents a faithful or distorted imageof the real author. It is impossible to say for certain which of theseuses Booth intended or whether he actually believed that they were all possible at once and did not feel obliged to distinguish between them in any detail. However, we can be more precise about the function the implied author had in the approach to literature Booth envisaged. The term originated as a compromise—it enabled him to give his approach a rhetorical foundation in which author and reader constitute the main frames of reference without openly falling foulof the fallacies denounced by the New Criticism in the process. Irre-spective of whether the basic features of this reconstruction are cor-rect, it remains a fact that all the variants of the concept to which we refer have been associated with the implied author in the subsequentreception of Booth’s work.

Like the meaning of the term itself, the theoretical status of theimplied author is not clear in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Was the im-plied author intended to be the central concept in a theory of inter-pretation, the defining entity to be sought for when interpreting a text? Or was it part of a quasi-empirical theory of reception, a con-struct that Booth thought was necessarily employed by every reader when dealing with texts? The ambiguity of the term and the theoryof which it was a part shows that the concept had a range of poten-tial meanings that extended far beyond the ways in which it was actually used by Booth. A crucial factor in shaping subsequent re-sponses to the implied author was the fact that the concept complied with the anti-contextualism of the New Criticism on the one hand,while being open to a multiplicity of new empirical applications and theoretical generalizations on the other. Use of the term was not restricted to a particular approach. It was also lacking in clarity and could be put into operation in any number of ways. Another factor at least equally important in shaping reception of the concept was,as we shall show with reference to its primary reception in the United States, the need to refresh the interpretive conventions and

Introduction 9

practice of the New Criticism without directly questioning its norms, let alone breaking them, something that did not happen until the reception of structuralism and poststructuralism began to take effect.18

After presenting a reconstruction of the context in which the con-cept took shape in the first chapter of our study, we turn in the sec-ond to reception of the implied author in the academic study of literature.19 Although we are able to suggest a number of reasons for the readiness with which American academics made use of the con-cept, its international reception is such a vast field that we cannot claim any authority when it comes to explaining the influences atwork here. Even so, it is clear if nothing else that international re-ception of the implied author has exploited the wide range of appli-cations to which the concept can lend itself. Booth himself simplypostulated that it plays an important role in literary communication;he neither specified the theoretical framework in which the impliedauthor was to be used nor provided a methodology for identifying it in individual cases.

It was the academic study of literature in Europe that respondedto the concept of the implied author most quickly and used it mostwidely. Long-term factors are bound to have been influential in this respect. In a climate in which historicism and positivism were un-popular, explaining works of art in terms of how they came into being had become discredited among European academics studyingliterature at the end of the nineteenth century. Interest in the author,his biography, and what he intended to express was dismissed as biographism or psychologism and banished from literary theory (but never with any consistency from actual interpretive practice). The literary work of art was to be interpreted on its own terms as a self-contained whole, a text without context. This normative definitionof the nature of works of art persisted, not without criticism,throughout the twentieth century, gaining new strength thanks to

18 See Berman (1988). 19 Although we cannot provide a detailed discussion of use of the implied au-

thor in other areas of cultural studies, we shall refer occasionally to its rolebeyond the study of literature when it is helpful to do so.


structuralism and poststructuralism. Only in the most recent past,with the appearance of contextualist literary theories, has the author begun attracting attention in interpretation again.20 The upshot of all this is that the energetic response to the implied author in Europeanliterary studies would seem to have been driven by the following feature of the concept: it allows us to speak of author-functions that stem from the real author without actually referring to the latter in the process.

The reception of the implied author is so diverse that it would not have been practical for us to trace the various lines of developmentchronologically, let alone aspire to cover every single piece of evi-dence. Instead, we have decided to take a typological approach to analysing the reception of the concept—to provide an overview of its most common typical uses and in the process identify featuresthat may be of use when explicating it. In doing so, we have been guided by the following questions: in what theoretical or practical contexts is the concept discussed and employed; is it analysed in further detail or defined, and if so, how; and what, if any, argumentsare advanced for or against its use? Our study will show that there are two dominant contexts in which the implied author is men-tioned: interpretive contexts and descriptive ones. In the latter, theconcept is almost always rejected. In the former, two subgroups of usage can be identified. The first covers use of the implied author in interpretation theory, the second its use in relation to interpretation in practice. The interpretation theory context has hosted a (some-times sporadic) discussion about the significance of the impliedauthor concept. This debate has yet to reach a tangible conclusion,not least because there is no theoretical framework available for discussing the structure of approaches to interpretation in the aca-demic study of literature.21 The implied author has been embracedmost often in relation to interpretive practice, with supporters of normative interpretation in all its forms making use of the conceptin many diverse situations. Our findings in this area will be pre-

20 On this, see the references in note 3 above.21 See Danneberg and Müller (1981, 1984a, 1984b), Stout (1982, 1986), Her-

merén (1983), Danneberg (1999), and Strube (1993, 2000).

Introduction 11

sented in full below; for the present, it is sufficient to note that thedominant tendency in use of the concept is to assume, though this is rarely stated explicitly, that we can use it to arrive at the meaning ofa literary text without leaving the level of description and without setting out a theory and methodology for working out what (or who)the implied author actually is in any given case.

We bring the second chapter of our study to a close by consider-ing a series of concepts that have been suggested as alternatives to the implied author. Even if they do not retain the term ‘implied au-thor’, they nonetheless preserve certain key aspects that lie at the heart of the concept. There are several reasons why alternative con-cepts of this kind have been introduced. For a start, Booth’s implied author has met with a not inconsiderable amount of criticism and acquired a problematic legacy that some writers have sought to sidestep by giving the concept a new name. Others have been un-happy with its connotations; some, for example, believe that the implied author as Booth understood it was still too intentionalistic, that it bore too many traces of a real author who, because implied, was still present in the text. It was thought that choosing an alterna-tive term would help to rectify this shortcoming. Finally, the 1970s saw a reorientation of literary theory in the light of which some feltit necessary to lift Booth’s concept out of the rhetorical haze of the 1960s and update its image to fit the contemporary climate. Oneway of doing this was to reformulate the concept in the context of the new literary theories that were appearing, such as reception the-ory or the aesthetics of reception, or analyses of literary communi-cation.

Our study does not consider the motives behind the introduction of new names for the implied author in further detail. Instead, weconfine ourselves to taking a closer look at the three alternative con-cepts that are encountered most frequently: Umberto Eco’s Model Author, Wolf Schmid’s abstract author, and Wolfgang Iser’s im-plied reader. In doing so, we hope to determine for each alternative (1) the theoretical context in which it was introduced, (2) what as-pects of the implied author it abandoned and what aspects it re-


tained, and finally (3) whether it managed to steer clear of the theo-retical anomalies associated with the implied author concept itself.

Our treatment of the origins and history of the implied author concept and some of the alternative names suggested for it results in the following conclusion: the implied author is one of those con-cepts—not, one suspects, all that uncommon in the humanities—that have managed to survive intact despite their conceptual anoma-lies and repeated calls that they be abolished or replaced. This state of affairs should not, however, give rise to resignation; instead, we believe, it strengthens the case for making a committed effort to ex-plicate the concept. We would suggest that previous proposals for abolishing or replacing the implied author have failed to appreciate the true complexity of the problems posed by the concept. It is our thesis that the implied author concept consists of components thatreflect correct intuitions in and of themselves, but conflict with oneanother when combined together in a single concept. A sensible ex-plication, therefore, must not try to explicate the concept as the contradictory whole that it is, but should seek instead to elucidate its individual components separately from one another in order to iden-tify what, if any, possible explications for them emerge. The objec-tive of this clarification process is to determine whether the indi-vidually correct intuitions behind the components of the impliedauthor concept can be expressed in a way that does not result in a contradiction. We subject two ways of modelling the implied author to such an analysis: the idea that it be treated as a participant incommunication on the one hand, the idea that it be treated as a sub-ject to which meaning can attributed on the other. Like most previ-ous research, we come to the conclusion that the implied authorcannot be understood as a participant in communication. The treat-ment of the implied author as a subject identified with a work’s meaning, however, is much harder to assess—the context of inter-pretation theory sees a whole range of possibilities unfold for bring-ing the implied author into play as a subject in which meaning can be seen to originate. Nonetheless, all ways of using the implied au-thor in this manner do have something in common. They go further than employing the concept to describe literary works—their ulti-

Introduction 13

mate aim is to ascertain the basic meaning of literary works. An objective of this kind can be properly discussed only in the context of theories about the interpretation of literature; it turns out that two completely different concepts of work meaning can be associatedwith the implied author, one intentionalistic, the other non-intentio-nalistic. Our explication of the two most frequent non-intentio-nalistic understandings of the implied author, the pragmatist and conventionalist ones, shows that they do not fulfil the basic require-ments that a convincing clarification of the concept should meet.

After discussing the non-intentionalistic idea of the implied au-thor, we move on to consider two variants of its intentionalisticcounterpart. In the process, we refer to the current state of discus-sion regarding intentionalistic theories of interpreting literary texts.We find that the perspective of hypothetical intentionalism can definitely be used to arrive at a more precise conception of the im-plied author. We believe, however, that it is more sensible to referto this narrower and more clear-cut concept as the ‘hypothetical’ or ‘postulated author’. Actual intentionalism, on the other hand, as-cribes the meaning of literary texts directly to their empirical au-thors, and therefore does not need an additional entity such as theimplied author to which meaning can be attributed.

The conclusion of our book can be summarized as follows: it is possible to provide an effective explication of the implied author,which is then better referred to as the ‘hypothetical’ or ‘postulated author’; the misleading term ‘implied author’, and the impreciseconcept behind it, on the other hand, can be safely put aside.

Part One

Reconstructing the Concept’s History

1 Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics:

The Origins of the Implied Author Concept

Surprisingly little attention has been given to the origins of the im-plied author in previous work on the concept. There are few studies of any substance that fail to inform us that the concept was intro-duced in a book entitled The Rhetoric of Fiction by an American literary theorist called Wayne C. Booth.1 Rarely, however, is this information accompanied by a more detailed treatment of the con-text in which concept was put forward, its background, and the aims attached to it.2 It can, perhaps, be fairly argued that the history of a concept does not tell us how it should be defined and what use it has, and this may go some way towards justifying the lack of a de-tailed appraisal of the context in which the implied author origi-nated. Even so, this omission has had a considerable effect on dis-cussion of the implied author, particularly on the quality of the sug-gestions put forward for retaining or rejecting, explicating or re-placing it.

For this reason, we shall use the coming pages to present a care-ful reconstruction of how the implied author came into being. This reconstruction has two parts. In the first (1.1), we consider a crucial influence on Booth’s approach to literary theory during the 1950s—the views on metatheory and the academic study of literature held by a group now known as the Chicago school of criticism.3 Some general remarks on Booth’s plan for a rhetoric of epic texts provide

1 Detailed consideration will show that this is something of an oversimplifica-tion in both historical and systematic respects (see 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 below).

2 The initial reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction from 1961 to 1966 are an exception (see 2.1.1 below).

3 Here and in what follows, we use the term ‘school’ solely for descriptive pur-poses rather than as a theoretical concept relating to the study of academic history (on this, see Kindt and Müller 2005, 336–39).

The Origins of the Implied Author Concept18

the starting point for the next stage of our analysis (1.2), in which we undertake a detailed study of how Booth introduced the concept of the implied author in his Rhetoric of Fiction of 1961 and how he defended it, with minor modifications, in various pieces of work over the forty years that preceded the writing of this book.

1.1 The Chicago School of Criticism

1.1.1 The Critical Turn in the Academic Study of Literature in North America

Growing dissatisfaction with the situation in literature departments became increasingly apparent at universities in the United States during the 1930s. This discontent was accompanied by calls for the departments to move forward in a fundamentally new direction. Nu-merous proposals, lectures, and articles demanded that the academic study of literature finally break away from the pursuit of history, around which it had been oriented since the nineteenth century, and follow the path of literary criticism into the future. It was no longer enough, it was said, for academics in this field to be historians with a special interest in the development of literature; instead, they should see themselves first and foremost as critics responsible for analysing and assessing it. This was the line that, in any number of variations, was taken when promoting a position captured program-matically in the pointed language of John Livingston Lowes, pre-sident of the Modern Language Association, when he wrote in 1933 that ‘the ultimate end of our research is criticism’.4

The call for a critical turn was prompted by the decline in status that had been affecting the literature-related disciplines since the turn of the century. It was customary for those working in literature

4 Lowes (1933, 1405; emphasis in original).

Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics 19

departments to blame this on the problems caused by an increas-ingly narrow focus in academic approaches to literature at the end of the nineteenth century. As its methods had become increasingly professionalized, so general opinion went, the discipline had lost sight of its true object and thus ceased to do what it was meant to do. Instead of being devoted to texts, it was believed, the academic study of literature had gradually been narrowed down to the study of context, to producing biographies and literary histories, to study-ing sources and discovering the influences at work in texts. Rather than seeking to interpret and evaluate the works themselves, that is to say, it was felt that academics had become increasingly content with engaging in textual criticism and producing editions. Just how miserable the reputation of the study of literature and those who represented it was in the mid-1930s can be seen in the following quotation from ‘Criticism Inc.’. John Crowe Ransom, one of the later founders of the New Criticism, used the manifesto set out in this piece to suggest that literary criticism become established in academic practice. He wrote that

Professors of literature are learned, but not critical men. The professional mo-rale of this part of the university staff is evidently low. It is as if, with con-scious or unconscious cunning, they had appropriated every avenue to escape from their responsibility which was decent and official; so that it is easy for one of them without public reproach to spend a lifetime in compiling the data of literature and yet rarely or never commit himself to a literary judgment. Nevertheless it is from the professors of literature, in this country the profes-sors of English in the most part, that I should hope eventually for the erection of intelligent standards of criticism. It is their business.5

The developments that gave rise to such complaints and the general sense of crisis in the academic study of literature should be viewed against the background of reforms that saw North American third-

5 Ransom (1938, 454). Wellek (1956, 60) retrospectively explained the revolt of the critics against the scholars as follows: ‘antiquarian scholarship domi-nated American universities and colleges well into the twentieth century. It has many achievements to its credit: editions, biographies, historical studies, investigations of sources, and so on, but failed to live up on the ideal of hu-mane learning as well as to the practical demands of teachers.’


level education remodelled along the lines of the European univer-sities. This process of change began in the second half of the nine-teenth century, when it was decided that the college system, the paradigmatic institutional framework since higher education first developed in the United States around 1700, was unable to meet the complex demands made of third-level education in a modern indus-trialized society. The curricula were outmoded and the number of graduates produced was too low.6 The main organizational feature of the reforms lay in the replacement of the rigid system of class groups by a more flexible system of courses and seminars.7 As far as the curriculum was concerned, the changes led to the introduc-tion of an approach that would become known as vocationalism. The traditional colleges aimed not to qualify students for particular careers but to provide them with a general schooling in critical thinking. Thus, the pursuit of learning for its own sake lay at the heart of their teaching, even if they usually sought to impart the necessary skills on the basis of specific canonical material such as the classical languages of Greek and Latin.8 The reformed universi-ties, on the other hand, were concerned more with imparting fixed content than with encouraging learning per se. The material content in question was meant to have the benefit of being of practical use rather than of traditional value.9 The gradual transformation of the colleges turned out to provide the basis for major advances in the natural sciences, but it had a number of problematic consequences

6 For general treatments of the history of the university in North America, see Rudolph (1962), Graff (1987), and Brubacher and Rudy (1997).

7 See here Graff (1987, 27–28). The establishment of the seminar system in German third-level education is described in vom Brocke (1999).

8 Geiger (1993, 236–37) summarizes the educational ideal behind the old-time college as follows: ‘According to the accepted contemporary doctrines of fac-ulty psychology, the chief aim of the college training was to instil “mental discipline”—the capacity to learn. This capacity was to be mastered, it was believed, by learning the classical languages, essentially by rote. Such learn-ing was conducted and monitored through classroom recitations. Knowledge under this system was not the end of education but the means.’

9 See Brubacher and Rudy (1997).


as far as the disciplines of the humanities were concerned.10 The individual disciplines were becoming increasingly compartmental-ized and their representatives increasingly specialized as it was; the implementation of the reforms merely accelerated this process, which led to the idea of a general education, so important in the hu-manities, being called unmistakably into question. The reforms in third-level education also meant that practical relevance became a key criterion by which academic progress was evaluated, a rele-vance that it was not easy for work in the humanities to demon-strate.11

By reorienting itself around literary criticism, it was hoped, the academic study of literature would be able to regain the prestige it had lost. Ambitious young academics and those on the fringes of the field were not the only ones to hold such a view. Not least, the call for a critical turn was made by many established figures, as the ex-amples of Lowes and Ransom demonstrate. Voices such as theirs may well have been the decisive factor behind the conceptual and institutional success of the project of refounding the study of litera-ture in the spirit of literary criticism, a success denied to practically all the many other attempts to redesign parts of the humanities from the ground up during the twentieth century.12 A fundamental change in the disposition of literature departments in the United States could be seen as early as the end of World War II. The voice of the scholars had shrunk to that of an insignificant minority; the critics’ party had gained the upper hand in the academic study of literature in North America. The aims of the discipline, the questions it posed, and the methods it used were now controlled by advocates of an approach in which the study of literature was based on literary criti-

10 Geiger (1993, 245) summarizes developments in the interwar years as fol-lows: ‘Still in the thrall of European learning after World War I in most ma-jor fields American scientists and scholars had established themselves at the frontiers of knowledge in virtually all fields by the eve of World War II.’

11 See Schneider (1994, 7–9). 12 See the following case studies of historical renewal movements in German

studies: Müller (1988), Kolk (1997), and Kindt and Müller (2005).


cism; they held the most important professorial chairs and ran the leading journals.

Naturally, the more successful the literary critics were in assert-ing their presence in the field, the clearer it became that there were considerable differences among them regarding the specific shape that they expected the new approach to literary works to take. In many cases, the supporters of the critical turn were united simply by their rejection of the study of literature as it was at the beginning of the century, not by a shared concept of literary criticism.13 With the New Criticism, it is true, a criticism-based programme became dominant in literature departments soon after the end of the war, but the New Critics were continually forced to defend their position against the programmes of competing approaches, and they finally, if slowly, began to lose their influence as a disciplinary force in the 1970s.14

1.1.2 The Chicago Critics: Pluralism and Aristotelianism

The most ambitious alternative to the New Criticism to appear in the study of literature during the decades following the critical turn originated in a small circle of intellectuals involved in the humani-ties and social studies in Chicago. They had been meeting at the suggestion of a literature professor called Ronald S. Crane since the early 1930s and soon became known as the Chicago group or the Chicago school of criticism.15 Apart from Crane himself, the most regular participants at the circle’s meetings included Richard

13 An overview of the various currents in the academic study of literature in North America during the 1940s and 1950s can be found in, for example, Wellek (1956, 59–88), Sutton (1963, 63–218), Webster (1979, 95–206), Goldsmith (1979, 102–45), Graff (1987, 183–243), and Leitch (1988, 1–147).

14 On the New Criticism, see in general Abrams (1998) and Wenzel (2001). 15 On the Chicago Critics, see McKeon (1982), Shereen (1988), and Schneider

(1994). For an analysis of Crane’s critical approach, see also Dietrichson (1963).


McKeon, philosopher, and Elder Olson, lyric poet, dramatist, and literary theorist. At the heart of their discussions lay the exchange of ideas about the situation of and future perspectives for the North American universities and their humanities departments.16

Crane’s essay ‘History versus Criticism in the Study of Litera-ture’ gave a first taste of the ideas developing in the discussions of the Chicago circle.17 It was published in the English Journal in 1935 and immediately attracted considerable interest. However, al-though this was the first text to draw attention to the Chicago critics and their suggestions for reforming literature departments, it is er-roneous to treat it as some kind of charter establishing the Chicago school of criticism there and then.18 At the time, only those in the know could see that the essay held the key to many of the ideas about theoretically and institutionally transforming the humanities that would take shape in the publications and reforms of the Chi-cago critics in the coming decades.19 For those contemporaries who did not take part in the Chicago meetings, however, Crane’s essay stood out only in terms of certain details, if that;20 it was merely one of many statements in favour of replacing the narrow historical ap-proach to the study of literature with a new emphasis on literary criticism. Crane did indeed provide an unusually careful analysis of the distinction between the historical reconstructions that were the work of scholars and the aesthetic evaluations with which critics

16 See the detailed reconstruction in Schneider (1994, 78–80). 17 Crane (1935). 18 As is the case in, for example, Corman (1994, 143). 19 See Schneider (1994, 78–93). The presence of specific concrete ideas behind

Crane’s essay is evident in a number of passages. See, for example, Crane (1935, 4) on the choice between the historical approach and that of literary criticism in the academic study of literature: ‘The answer we give to this question will determine not only the view we take of the proper place and function of our departments in the university, but also, to a greater or lesser extent, the policy we pursue with respect to courses and appointments, ex-aminations and dissertations, and ultimately perhaps the orientation of re-search.’

20 Wellek (1956, 64) captures this point when he reports that ‘the article did not commit itself to any specific critical method’.


were concerned. His reading of the overall situation in the academic study of literature, however, concurred with general opinion in the field:

… it cannot be denied that literary history … has occupied too privileged a place, especially during recent years. However vigorously on occasion we may have professed our allegiance to criticism, it has not been criticism but history to which we have devoted our really serious energy and thought. Re-search has been our watchword, and with results we need not be ashamed of; but for the most part we have narrowed the meaning of the term until it has come to stand, not broadly for responsible and original inquiries of all sorts, but specifically for inquiries among documents pursued for strictly historical ends. Our teaching meantime has taken a similar course.21

Like all the other calls for a critical turn in the study of literature, Crane’s essay basically proposed a ‘thoroughgoing revision in our departments of literature’,22 calling for the predominant approach to literature, the historical one, to be replaced by that of literary criti-cism.

Just how well Crane’s essay fitted into the general trend of work advocating such a reorientation can be seen from the enthusiasm with which the piece was received by many of the literary critics who were later, in the 1950s, to be involved in bitter arguments with the Chicago school about the path that should be followed in the academic study of literature. In hindsight it is remarkable to find subsequent advocates of the New Criticism such as John C. Ransom and William K. Wimsatt welcoming ‘History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature’ as a groundbreaking contribution to their pro-ject of converting the study of literature to literary criticism. Ran-som, whose 1941 monograph The New Criticism established him as a central figure in the movement of the same name,23 actually seemed convinced in 1938 that Crane’s essay would pave the way for the necessary reorientation of literature departments: ‘At the University of Chicago … Professor Crane, with some others, is put-

21 Crane (1935, 20–21). 22 Crane (1935, 22). 23 Ransom (1941).


ting the revolution into effect’.24 And Wimsatt, referring to the Chi-cago critics in 1954, looked back with regret to the common ground that Crane’s piece of two decades earlier had seemed to establish. In retrospect, ‘History versus Criticism’ seemed to him to be a ‘revo-lutionary document’ that made a decisive contribution to a ‘victory for criticism’ in the academic study of literature.25

Only gradually, with the publications that emerged from the Chi-cago group in the 1940s, did it become clear just how little the Chi-cago critics shared with the New Critics and a host of other contem-porary movements in the academic study of literature.26 The com-mon ground consisted of little more than a shared desire to establish literary criticism in academia. Once Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern was published in 1952,27 there could no longer be any reasonable doubt that Crane’s circle had its own very specific ideas about how aesthetics was to replace historiography as the concep-tual foundation on which the study of literature was based. The col-lection of essays in Critics and Criticism made it unmistakably clear that a distinctive programme had taken shape at the University of Chicago.28 In the book, Crane, McKeon, Olson, Norman Maclean, Bernard Weinberg, and William R. Keast set out the epistemologi-cal foundations, object of study, and methodological procedures that they felt should be adopted in the academic study of literature. In addition, many contributions to the collection sought to place the programme behind it in a historical and contemporary context, to relate it to how literature had been analysed in the past and to the competing approaches of the present respectively.

Critics and Criticism was the Chicago school’s response to the loss of standing experienced by the disciplines of the humanities

24 Ransom (1938, 456). 25 Wimsatt (1954b, 41). 26 See in particular Crane et al. (1942) and Crane (1947/48). 27 Crane et al. (1952). In the shortened version of the book published in 1957

(Crane et al. 1957), which contained only eight of the original twenty contri-butions, the subtitle ‘Ancient and Modern’ was replaced by ‘Essays in Method’.

28 This is shown by the reactions to the anthology (see 1.1.3 below).


since the turn of the century. As Crane highlighted in his introduc-tion to the book, one concern of the pieces in this ‘Chicago Mani-festo’ was the question of how the humanities might be able ‘to play a more influential role in the culture and action of the contemporary world’.29 The answer put forward by the Chicago critics had two key components, one relating to metatheory and expressed in a plu-ralistic openness towards competing programmes in the text-based disciplines, and one concerning the study of literature itself and consisting of an Aristotelian model for analysing literary texts.30

Metatheoretical Pluralism

If, borrowing from Kenneth Burke, we describe the Chicago critics as neo-Aristotelians or neo-Aristotelian literary critics,31 we run the risk of forgetting that the circle around Crane and McKeon was neither solely nor primarily concerned with putting forward a speci-fic concrete form of literary criticism.32 Since the early 1930s, the Chicago critics had actually attached greater significance to syste-matic reflection on the place, possibilities, and boundaries of the humanities. Their concept of literary analysis was subsequently in-tended to provide an example of what this kind of reflection could

29 Crane (1952a, 2); see also Sprinker (1985, 193). The term ‘Chicago Mani-festo’ was first used by Johnson (1953a; 1953b). On this essay, see Crane (1953b); on the idea of a Chicago manifesto itself, see Crane (1957, vi).

30 See Kindt and Müller (2005, 336–42) on the concept of the historiography of academic scholarship on which the following discussion is based.

31 See Burke (1943). 32 Lohner (1967), for example, falls foul of this trap in his otherwise accom-

plished portrayal of the Chicago school. Burke himself cannot be accused of making a similar mistake. The descriptions he suggested were based solely on knowledge of Crane et al. (1942); the Chicago school’s work on the his-tory and theory of the humanities did not appear until the late 1940s, the 1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Crane 1947/48, 1952a, McKeon 1952a, and Olson 1952, 1966).


involve.33 Thus, unlike the New Critics and other proponents of a critical turn in the humanities, the representatives of the Chicago school took ‘criticism’ to mean not just criticism in the mode of Babbit and Spingarn but also, and primarily, critique in a Kantian sense. In response to what he saw as oversimplistic understandings of Critics and Criticism, Crane used the preface to the book’s 1957 edition to make clear once more that ‘if there is … any “Chicago Manifesto”, its theme is the desirability of looking at criticism from a “critical” point of view’.34

The Chicago critics had no doubt that such a review was needed given the changing history of the humanities in the past and their diversity in the present:

… the history of the humanities, so far from being a chronicle of cumulative advance, has repeatedly illustrated—and in several fields illustrates all too well today—the tendency of the humane arts to lapse from time to time into contentment with simple and easy procedures and a narrow range of questions and distinctions, to substitute rhetoric or sectarian polemic for disinterested inquiry, to break with the past and make new starts by struggling afresh with problems long since solved, or (as in much contemporary linguistics, philoso-phy, and criticism) to seek renovation, unhumanistically, by assimilating themselves to the sciences of nature or society.35

Previously, in the view of those representing the Chicago circle, this state of affairs in the humanities had been either ignored—con-cealed behind the dogma of received opinion—or taken to extremes in the sceptical denial that the humanities could produce any in-sights at all. Now, it was suggested, it was finally time for dogma and scepticism to make way for serious reflection on the competing lines of academic thought and historically orientated theories of literature. They should be compared, evaluated, and analysed in detail. Only on the basis of such an undertaking, the Chicago critics

33 See Olson’s recollection of how Crane saw the humanities around 1935; he says that Crane ‘felt, as I did, … that the theory of both literary history and history in general must be more closely looked into; and that the present con-dition of critical theory was deplorable’ (Olson 1984, 234).

34 Crane (1957, vi). 35 Crane (1952a, 4).


believed, could a position of high ground be obtained amid the dis-putes unfolding in the humanities. Olson restated this view in 1966 when he wrote that ‘examination of the philosophic foundations of criticism’ was ‘requisite for the proper development of the theory of the arts’.36

The supporters of the Chicago school were not content, as many others in the humanities were, with merely proposing that the his-torically-oriented text-based literary disciplines be given a philoso-phical foundation. In a series of publications, they went a step fur-ther and set about making their hopes a reality. Accordingly, in their search for insight into the nature of assertions and the construction of theories in the humanities, the Chicago critics not only recon-structed the development of poetics and criticism since the classical period;37 they also analysed the dominant positions in the academic study of literature in North America after 1900.38 Their historical studies and systematic reflection led them to appraise the ap-proaches of literary criticism in a way that differed considerably from the dominant ideas of the time. Again and again, Crane and his Chicago supporters fired new salvos questioning prevailing aca-demic views about the coexistence of different approaches to inter-pretation in the study of literature. Their criticism was directed both at attempts to put an end to such competition by settling on a single mode of interpretation,39 and at the idea that the various approaches of the literary disciplines should be seen as complementing one an-other in the search for a comprehensive explanation of literary works.40 Rejecting such positions, the Chicago critics advocated an

36 Olson (1966, 207). 37 See, for example, McKeon (1952a, 1952b) or Crane (1967). 38 See, for example, Crane et al. (1942), Crane (1947/48, 1953a), or Olson

(1966). 39 The Chicago school believed this was one of the aims pursued in most pro-

grammes in the academic study of literature in the first half of the twentieth century: Ransom’s approach, Brooks’s position, the New Criticism of Wim-satt and Beardsley, the theory of Wellek and Warren, and so on.

40 The Chicago critics saw such ideas in, for example, Richard P. Blackmur’s attempt to mediate between the New Critics and their opponents. See Black-mur (1951) and Crane (1952a, 6; 1953a, 9).


alternative stance that Crane described as a ‘pluralistic and instru-mentalist view of criticism’.41

The representatives of the Chicago school believed that it was neither possible nor desirable to remove pluralism from the aca-demic study of literature—it was perfectly clear, they felt, that competing ways of analysing and interpreting literary texts could be equally valid and relevant. The ideas on which the resultant Chi-cago pluralism was based can be summarized very briefly as fol-lows. The practical study of literature always depends on the selec-tion of a particular theoretical approach, a choice that can be made explicitly or implicitly. The selection process is composed of two main decisions: first, specifying a ‘universe of discourse’, a vocabu-lary which determines the object of study and the key questions asked about it; and second, choosing a ‘system of inference’ to use as a source of orientation, a set of procedures and rules to follow when examining the object of study.42 It is impossible to find rea-sons that necessitate the choices made on a particular occasion: the programme of literary theory that is chosen can be justified only in terms of the aims being pursued in each case.43

For the Chicago critics, then, pluralism in the academic study of literature results from the fact that statements made about literary works in this context can claim only relative validity, nothing more. There are two reasons for this: such statements are dependent first on the approach chosen and second on the overarching objectives in each particular case. Crane summarized this view succinctly in the

41 Crane (1952a, 9). 42 See Olson (1966, 209–10). The form of literary theory employed—the ap-

proach used—was thus understood, in brief, as a ‘function of its subject mat-ter and of the dialectic, i.e., system of inference, exerted upon that subject matter’ (Olson 1952, 548).

43 The work of the Chicago critics does not contain a fixed term for the com-plexes of vocabulary and methodology that we refer to as approaches here. Most frequently, with reference to the New Criticism or marxist literary criti-cism, say, the Chicago critics encounter the words ‘frameworks’ (see, for example, Crane 1953a, 13) or ‘methods’ (see, for example, Crane 1952a, 8). On the disadvantages of this use of the term ‘method’, as commonplace as it is misleading, see Titzmann (1977, 381–82) or Müller (1984, 90).


1953 Alexander Lectures, published in his Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry: ‘There is … a strict relativity, in criti-cism, not only of statements and questions to frameworks but of frameworks to ends, that is, to the different kinds of knowledge about poetry we may happen at one time or another or for one or another reason, to want.’44

In order to avoid misunderstandings, Crane and his Chicago sup-porters were constantly concerned that their reflections on the aca-demic study of literature should make clear the difference between their metatheoretical ideas and other approaches to pluralism in the field. In this respect, it was most important for them to point out that assuming different forms of literary analysis to be relative did not mean subscribing to an unconstrained relativism—their plural-ism was not to be confused with, to borrow one of Booth’s formu-lations, a ‘live-and-let-live eclecticism’.45 For the Chicago critics, seeing the academic study of literature as a ‘collection of distinct and more or less incommensurable “frameworks”’ in no way amounted to claiming that it was impossible to subject interpreta-tions and theories of interpretation to criticism.46 Quite the opposite, they said: only by reconstructing, as they did, the underlying as-sumptions of literary analyses can we see how we should proceed when discussing the meaning of a text or approaches to textual in-terpretation. In the preface to the 1957 edition of Critics und Criti-cism, Crane tried again to make clear what the Chicago school cer-tainly did not mean when it referred to pluralism:

It does not imply that one cannot compare the results obtained in a given method (for instance, that of Plato) with the results obtained in another (for instance, that of Aristotle); or that one can never appeal beyond a critic’s ver-sion of the literary facts to the facts themselves; or that one has to take all methods critics have used at face value, with no possibility of saying that some are more comprehensive than others or more appropriate to the known facts of literature and literary history. There is a great difference between ‘plu-

44 Crane (1953a, 27). 45 Booth (1967, xx). For a more detailed analysis of the Chicago pluralism,

concentrating on Crane, see Booth (1979, 39–97). 46 Crane (1953a, 13).


ralism’ and ‘relativism’, and also between ‘pluralism’ and merely amiable tol-erance of half-truths, bad reasonings, and preposterous interpretations.47

The efforts of the Chicago critics to encourage a more balanced re-sponse to their metatheoretical positions on the study of literature, however, met with little success.48

Aristotelian Criticism

The circle around Crane and McKeon during the 1930s and 1940s was united not just in its treatment of the way the humanities oper-ated but also in its efforts to develop its own approach to textual analysis. Studies of textual genesis and exercises in textual criticism had become the ends rather than the means for mainstream aca-demics studying literature in North America at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Chicago critics, on the other hand, argued for a mode of literary analysis in which the questions posed and methods followed were based on Aristotle’s philosophical works, mainly the Poetics, but also other texts.49 The Chicago school did not believe that the resultant reorientation of the study of literature would show them the ‘right’ way of understanding literary texts. Rather, in accordance with their ideas on the nature of their disci-pline, they believed that adopting an Aristotelian view of literature represented a ‘strictly pragmatic and nonexclusive commitment’.50

The Chicago critics justified the adoption of this theoretical pro-gramme by arguing that making recourse to Aristotle allowed them to develop a comprehensive framework for textual analysis, one that could also be linked to many other areas in which theories were being developed in the academic study of literature. In addition,

47 Crane (1957, iv–v). 48 See 1.1.3 below. 49 See Sprinker (1985, 196–97) on differences between the ideas of Crane on

the one hand and McKeon and Olson on the other. 50 Crane (1952a, 12–13).


they felt that an Aristotelian approach helped to highlight aspects of literary works that otherwise tended to be neglected in the study of literature.51

In the following pages, we shall describe in outline the pro-gramme pursued by the Chicago school of criticism, reconstructing (1) the fundamental assumptions made about the object of study in this approach and (2) the central ideas held about the methodology with which it should be examined.

(1) Drawing on Aristotle, the Chicago critics took as their start-ing point a concept of literature that differed significantly from the other concepts that were current in the 1940s and 1950s. The schol-ars around Crane believed that literature had been widely seen as ‘one of many modes of discourse’ since late antiquity, and that such a view had been the predominant one from romanticism onwards; they set themselves apart from this position by calling for literary texts to be understood as a ‘special class of made objects’ that are ‘analyzable by analogy with natural things and artifacts’.52 This modification of the way in which the study of literature understands its object may seem rather unspectacular at first sight; for the Chi-cago critics, however, it amounted to nothing less than a funda-mental reorientation of how we go about dealing with literature. If literature is treated as a form of speech, they believed, there is a danger that literary texts will be seen simply as illustrative examples of literariness. This in turn can mean that analysts will be content to pick out the aspects of a text that allow it to be assigned to this form of discourse and leave it at that. The Chicago critics felt that this approach to literary texts was typical of the work of the New Criti-cism; Kenneth Burke concisely described it as follows in 1943:

One begins by expounding some general philosophic or metaphysical or psy-chological frame. Next one treats poetry in general as a representative aspect of this frame. And finally one treats specific poems as individual instances of

51 See Crane (1952a, 13), McKeon (1952a, 1952b), and Olson (1952, 1966). 52 Crane (1952a, 13–14).


vessels of poetry. The … critic thus employs what we might call a process of narrowing down.53

The Chicago critics saw their concept of literature as a means of guarding against the risk of treating literary texts in this way. If lit-erature is conceived of as a class of objects rather than a form of speech, they felt, critics will no longer be able to get away with fo-cusing solely on how a certain kind of discourse is manifested in the individual literary works they study. Instead, the Chicago critics suggested, treating texts as objects means viewing them as artistic wholes whose composition is governed by a principle that should be elucidated by analysing their construction and component parts. Thus, the Chicago critics used their definition of literature as the basis on which they advocated a form of literary criticism that would examine individual works in particular rather than literature in general. For Crane, the Aristotelian orientation produced a shift from a ‘criticism of poetry’ to a ‘criticism of poems’,54 for in his eyes it led to an analysis of texts

which takes as its starting point the peculiar natures of artistic wholes their writers were engaged in constructing and which attempts to explain and ap-preciate their parts, and the relations these bear to one another, as poetically necessary or desirable consequences of the writers’ commitment to certain kinds of poetic structures and effects rather than others.55

The academic study of literature should, as the Chicago critics un-derstood it, aim to examine literary works as concrete artistic wholes, and should do so with the aim of identifying the elements, structure, and functioning of such wholes. The Chicago school, in other words, advocated the pursuit of historically appropriate recon-structions of literary texts.

(2) Aristotelian thought also provided the basis for the meth-odological ideas held by the representatives of the Chicago circle. The Chicago critics were all agreed that the analysis of literary texts should finally become an inductive rather than a deductive proce-

53 Burke (1943, 85). 54 See above all Crane (1947/48). 55 Crane (1952a, 15). See also the reconstruction in Sprinker (1985, 195–96).


dure. Instead of the top-down interpretation that had become the dominant method in the wake of the New Criticism, they wanted to see a bottom-up mode of analysis introduced so that individual works could be understood on the basis of their construction.56 Only by putting this plan into practice, they believed, would it be possible to make a true reality of the aim, which the New Critics set them-selves but did not achieve, of elucidating works from a consistently text-internal perspective. Responding in 1948 to The Well-Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks,57 Crane provided the following brief expla-nation of the far-reaching methodological implications that he saw in the Chicago critics’ idea of the literary text:

To reconstruct criticism in this way would obviously be to reverse the whole tendency of critical reasoning as practiced by the ‘new critics.’ It would be to substitute the matter-of-fact and concrete for the abstract; the a posteriori for the a priori; the argument from immediately sensible poetic effects to their proximate poetic causes for the argument from remote and nonpoetic causes to only general and common poetic effects. It would be, in one word, to study poems as complete wholes possessed of distinctive emotional powers rather than merely the materials and devices of poems in a context of extrapoetic considerations.58

Within the Chicago school itself, however, little attention was given to the exact form that the inductive analysis of literary texts should take. The plentiful output of the Chicago critics contains only scat-tered pointers to the methods and tools that might be used for ex-amining individual literary wholes and identifying the ideas under-lying their composition. Model interpretations of individual literary works are even more uncommon. Taken together, however, the iso-lated remarks and occasional case studies do show that the Chicago school was widely agreed regarding the exact way in which textual analysis should proceed.

The methodological position of the circle around Crane was characterized by two key factors. First, textual analysis was seen as

56 See Crane et al. (1942) for an early example of this; see also the remarks in Burke (1943).

57 Brooks (1947). 58 Crane (1947/48, 245).


an interplay of empirical observation and generic supposition. Analysis was meant, in other words, to take the component parts of a work and use them to suggest which genre the work belonged to, so as to obtain against the background of this genre assignment a more precise picture of the component parts and the relations be-tween them. The composition of a work and the principle behind it were to be determined by means of a corresponding procedure, sometimes by repeating it several times.59

Second, the theory of causality that Aristotle developed in the Physics and applied in other writings,60 such as the Poetics,61 was central to the way in which such analyses were envisaged. The idea was that the special quality of a literary work could be brought out by seeking to identify, with reference to transhistorical genre mod-els, its causa materialis, causa formalis, causa efficiens, and causafinalis.62 Consequently, the academic study of literature was to de-termine the parts of which a work consisted, the way in which it was put together, the intentions it sought to realize, and the effects it aimed to achieve. Importantly, the question of a text’s causa effi-ciens and causa finalis was not be understood as one involving the author’s intentions and the effect the text had on the recipient. Both the internal causes (the causae intresecus) and the external causes (the causae extrasecus) of a literary work were to be determined

59 A careful reconstruction of this process can be found in Richter (1982, 34–37). Despite their prolific work on the history of the humanities, the Chicago critics do not seem to have noticed the parallels between their positions and hermeneutic thought of the nineteenth century such as the approaches of Friedrich Schleiermacher or August Boeckh.

60 See Aristotle, Physics (194a–b) and the overview in Rapp (2001, 127–30). 61 This, at least, was the way in which the Chicago critics understood Aristotle’s

poetics. See, for example, Olson (1952, 549): ‘Aristotle … employs differen-tiations of object, means, manner, and effect to define tragedy’. The works of the Chicago critics do not indicate how aware they were of the significance of the causal model in the history of hermeneutics since the Middle Ages (see, for example, Danneberg 1999, 89–91).

62 See Vince (1993, 117).


according to its formal shape alone.63 Thus, the Aristotelian causal model should be seen as a conceptual model for an approach to textual analysis in which the communicative functions of a work are to be determined on the basis of its construction.

Summarizing our brief consideration of the approach to literary theory advocated by the Chicago critics, it is clear that they wanted the disciplines of literary study to be reoriented on an Aristotelian basis. In their view, the aim of analysing literary works should be to identify for each work the specific ‘final end or first principle of construction … which determines most completely the form or ef-fect of the whole’.64 Historical contexts could be considered when identifying this ‘first principle’, but the starting point of any analy-sis had to be the text itself. Aristotle’s theory of causality was to serve as a heuristics. The interpretation of literature as the Chicago school of criticism understood it was, in short, aimed at recon-structing the composition of literary works as closely as possible.65

1.1.3 The Legacy of the Chicago School

The influence of the Chicago school of criticism was minimal; at most, the Chicago critics succeeded in converting some of their own students to their ideas. And even in their first generation, these stu-dents did not subscribe blindly to the programme of their teachers. Instead, they took the Chicago pluralism and Aristotelianism as the basis for their own reflections, which led to the development of a

63 See Shereen (1988, 40), who writes that ‘neither the author nor the audience are ignored; yet they are only considered as elements contributing to the form’.

64 Crane (1953a, 57). 65 See also the comments in Corman (1994, 144). It is, however, not entirely

clear why the Chicago critics’ approach should follow, as Corman suggests, from their decision to use the Aristotelian mimesis concept as a point of ori-entation.


wide range of heterogeneous positions.66 The views that Crane’s circle held regarding metatheory and literary theory never met with any approval of note beyond Chicago. True, the Chicago school became the object of widespread academic attention in the study of literature in North America when Critics and Criticism was pub-lished, but this interest was short-lived—once the bitter disputes over their manifesto had subsided, the Chicago critics were soon forgotten.67 Introductions to the theories and methods of literary study do not consider the Chicago school’s approach worthy of sub-stantial appraisal, and rarely is the work of its representatives to be found in collections of key texts in the development of literary the-ory in the United States during the twentieth century.68

One reason for the limited influence of the Chicago school must lie in the withering criticism that its approach received at the hands of the New Critics. The publication of the Chicago manifesto, itself in large part an attack on the New Criticism, led representative sup-porters of the latter to launch a rapid counter-offensive in the form of a series of reviews, alternative analyses, and commentaries de-signed to expose major shortcomings in the Chicago critics’ ap-proach. In the process, the metatheoretical ideas of the Chicago school were rarely considered important enough to merit substantial critical consideration; some appraisals even failed to make any ref-erence at all to this part of the Chicago programme.69 One explana-tion for this was certainly the fact that most critics were opposed to the idea of pluralism in the academic endeavour of which they were

66 See Richter (1982) on the relationship between the first and second genera-tions of the Chicago school. Booth (1982, 22–24) gives an overview of the most prominent second- and third-generation supporters of the Chicago ap-proach.

67 See the comments in Wellek (1956, 67), Webster (1979, 123), and Leitch (1988, 80). Despite Lohner’s 1967 essay (Lohner 1967), the German-speak-ing countries did not produce a comprehensive discussion of the Chicago critics until Schneider’s essential study (Schneider 1994)—consider, for ex-ample, the earlier treatments in Strelka and Hinderer (1970) or Zapf (2001).

68 Examples include Glicksberg (1951), Stovall (1955), Rahv (1957), Scott (1962), Erzgräber (1970), Lipking and Litz (1972), and Guerin et al. (1992).

69 Ransom (1952), for example.


part but could not produce any theoretical justification for their hostility to it.70 The main reason why there was no serious engage-ment with the Chicago pluralism, however, must be the simple fact that it was not considered convincing. In the eyes of opponents from the New Criticism circle, the calls for an Aristotelian approach to literature and the polemics against competing modes of textual analysis suggested that the Chicago school was not all that confi-dent about its own concept of different but equally valid ways of examining literature.71 ‘The plea for pluralism,’ Samuel F. Johnson wrote, summarizing the repeated objections raised against the Crane circle’s metatheoretical ideas, ‘seems to have been an afterthought, and is effectually denied by the general tone of the rest of the book’.72

Those in the New Criticism circle gave rather more attention to the Chicago school’s Aristotelianism than they did to its pluralism, but the unfavourable outcome was just the same. The reviewers of Critics and Criticism were unanimous in asserting that Aristotelian ideas could not provide the basis for a contemporary theoretical approach: adopting an Aristotelian point of orientation in one’s the-ory, they argued, inevitably meant disregarding many important advances made in the debates on the theory of interpretation that had taken place in the preceding decades. Ransom’s view of the Crane circle’s approach was now noticeably different from what it had been fifteen years earlier: ‘since it was a program which had to be recovered from antiquity,’ he wrote this time, ‘it was anti-

70 This tendency was still present as late as 1970 when Bosonnet (1970, 58) at-tacked the Chicago pluralism on the basis that such a perspective made the interpretation of literature look like ‘no more than a glass bead game’ (‘bloßes Glasperlenspiel’; my translation).

71 Criticism of the mismatch between the Chicago school’s pluralistic pro-gramme and its practical implementation is entirely legitimate. In an essay subtitled ‘Neo-Aristotelianism since R. S. Crane’, Richter (1982, 30) hit the mark when he said of the founding father of the Chicago critics that ‘for every page he wrote expounding instrumental pluralism he wrote two ques-tioning the validity of rival schools of criticism’.

72 Johnson (1953a, 250). For examples of similar objections to the Chicago pluralism, see Vivas (1953, 148) or Wimsatt (1954b, 46–47, 58).


quated’.73 The critics of the Chicago school saw its approach as a step backwards because it gave no consideration to certain aspects of literary analysis that were of crucial importance in their eyes.74

Above all, the Chicago Critics were reproached for not showing sufficient interest in the linguistic form of literary texts. The Crane circle’s understanding of literary criticism was, in Johnson’s eyes, nothing more than ‘plot summary or paraphrase’.75 It should not need pointing out that such gaps appeared in the Chicago pro-gramme only when it was viewed from the perspective of the par-ticular alternative approach which the observer happened to prefer in any given case. Another line of attack aimed at exposing underly-ing fallacies in the theory and practice of the Chicago circle. Where Crane’s group had hoped that adopting Aristotelian positions would make it possible to pursue a text-internal form of literary analysis, the New Critics thought the Aristotelian orientation had entirely the opposite effect. They assumed that any theory of interpretation based on Aristotle would always bring with it the temptation of looking outside texts when examining them. Wimsatt’s review of the Chicago manifesto captured this risk in what he called the ‘fal-lacy of neoclassic species’:

It is quite clear that they [the Chicago critics] want or believe they want to study the poem, not its origins or results. But two of the most important terms in the Chicago system are ‘pleasure’ and ‘purpose’. And if these terms have even in Aristotle some tendency away from poems toward genetic and affec-tive psychology, they have it more decidedly for the Chicago critics.76

The New Critics, then, accused the Chicago school of making a neoclassic fallacy—of assuming that it was possible to use Aristo-telian positions as the basis for textual analysis without committing an intentional and affective fallacy by bringing the author and re-cipients of the work in question into consideration.77

73 Ransom (1952, 649). 74 See, for example, Johnson (1953a, 251–52, 256), Ransom (1952, 653), or

Wimsatt (1954b, 44). 75 Johnson (1953a, 255). 76 Wimsatt (1954b, 60). 77 See Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946, 1954).


In reality, the effectiveness with which the New Critics attacked the Chicago school had little to do with the validity of their objec-tions to a neo-Aristotelian reorientation of literary theory. They are more likely to have succeeded because of sociological factors in the academic community rather than because of the quality of their ar-guments. The commentaries of Ransom, Wimsatt, and other sup-porters of the New Criticism made perfectly legitimate points on individual issues, but it is quite clear that the overall picture they presented did not do justice to the Chicago group.78 The real reason for the success with which the New Critics attacked the Crane circle lay in academic power structures in the study of literature in North America at the beginning of the 1950s. By this time, the New Criti-cism had already assumed a clear position of superiority in the study of literature; the Chicago school had at best an outsider’s role to play. The responses to Critics and Criticism, in other words, were not the cause of the difficulties that the Crane circle had in asserting itself in the academic study of literature. Instead, the reviews of the Chicago manifesto were simply the last stage in a process that had begun in the 1930s with the calls for literary criticism to be given a place in academia. There were many reasons for this process, in the course of which the New Criticism became the leading movement in the academic study of literature and the Chicago criticism failed to attain a significant status even within the field. In all probability, however, there were two crucial factors at work, both of which were related only indirectly to the two competing programmes.79

The first major reason for the difficulties experienced by the Chicago school in asserting itself in competition with the New

78 Some monographs on the history of literary criticism in the United States see things differently. Drawing on the arguments of the New Criticism, they at-tribute the failure of the Chicago school to shortcomings in its approach. Readers of Grant Webster’s Republic of Letters, for example, are told that ‘the theoretical issues raised by the Aristotelians have become obsolete even before the death of their defenders’ (Webster 1979, 123). Further examples of this position can be found in Wellek (1956, 67–68) and Goldsmith (1979, 144–45).

79 See the pointers in Leitch (1988, 79–80) and Schneider (1994, 44–48).


Criticism lay in its failure to step beyond the institutional context in which it developed. This meant that its potential influence on the debates of literary criticism would always be limited. Even though supporters of the Crane circle held key positions at the University of Chicago and edited an internationally renowned journal, ModernPhilology,80 they had nothing approaching the resources available to the New Criticism for disseminating its ideas. Representatives of the latter taught at several respected third-level institutions and were able to influence a number of important publications such as TheSewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review.81

The second, probably crucial disadvantage of the Chicago critics in their confrontation with the New Criticism lay in the way in which Crane and his supporters went about publicizing their ap-proach, their concept of literature, and their metatheoretical ideas. The New Critics set out their programme in a wide range of text-books and produced a series of model studies, ripe for imitation, in which they gave a detailed picture of how it could be applied in practice.82 The representatives of the Chicago school, on the other hand, published mostly on questions of theory and metatheory in the academic study of literature.83 The Chicago critics never put together a more widely accessible presentation of their approach, and only rarely did they produce illustrative examples of it in use. After two brief tasters of the Aristotelian analysis of literature pro-vided by Olson and Maclean in 1942,84 the next examples of how the Chicago school’s programme could be put into practice did not appear until the manifesto of 1952, and then only in two of the

80 See Keast’s review of Crane’s period as editor of Modern Philology (Keast 1952).

81 See Berman (1988) and Wenzel (2001). 82 Particularly prominent here are the following popular handbooks edited by

Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics: An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Under-standing Drama (1945).

83 See 1.1.2 above. 84 Crane et al. (1942).


twenty contributions to Critics and Criticism: Crane’s study of TomJones and Maclean’s piece on King Lear.85

Unlike his teachers, Crane, McKeon, and Olson, Wayne C. Booth worked out his position in discussions of literary works rather than in theoretical treatises. This, not least, may well be why Booth’s work found a resonance that the first generation of the Chi-cago school did not. To that work we now turn.

1.2 Wayne C. Booth and the Implied Author Concept

1.2.1 Booth’s Combined Ethical and Rhetorical Approach to Literary Texts

Wayne Clayson Booth began his postgraduate study of English lit-erature at the University of Chicago in 1946. Born into a Mormon community in Utah in 1921, Booth had gained his B.A. at Brigham Young University in 1944. Before starting his postgraduate work, however, he decided to complete a period of work as a Mormon missionary begun in 1942, and he had then to carry out national service in the United States Army, starting in the last year of the war and finishing in the year after it ended. Exposure to the teach-ing of the Chicago critics soon converted Booth to their cause. ‘All of us who encountered Richard McKeon, Ronald Crane, Elder Ol-son, Norman Maclean, Rea Keast, or Bernard Weinberg just after World War II’, he recalled, ‘knew that there was a Chicago School and that if we just worked hard enough we could master their se-crets and join the elect.’86 Spurred on by this prospect, Booth soon completed his studies, obtaining his M.A. in 1947 and receiving his Ph.D. for a thesis entitled ‘Tristram Shandy and its Precursors: The

85 Crane (1952b) and Maclean (1952). 86 Booth (1982, 19).


Self-Conscious Narrator’ in 1950. After obtaining his doctorate, he worked as an assistant professor at Haverford College for three years and spent eight more years as a professor at Earlham College. Then, in 1961, he returned to the University of Chicago to become the George M. Pullman Professor of English. Booth taught there until his retirement, holding a number of visiting professorships and research grants during that time.87

In the year that saw him return to the University of Chicago, Booth produced in The Rhetoric of Fiction the work that would soon, in the course of a few years, secure him a prominent place on the scene of international literary theory.88 Even at an early stage, soon after its publication, the book was the object of considerable attention. This was because it suggested that literary works be stud-ied in a way that had previously been employed only in connection with didactic literature or pragmatic speech. As its title suggests, Booth’s wide-ranging work proposed that the methods of rhetorical analysis should be applied to epic texts for which such an approach had not previously been considered appropriate. In the preface to the monograph, Booth made clear that he would be concerned with a rhetorical approach to the epic, not with didactic literature, pro-pagandistic texts, or the literature of political activism:

My subject is the technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of com-municating with readers—the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader.89

In pursuing this line of interest, Booth gave special attention to the way in which moral positions are communicated. Essentially, he

87 For more detailed information on Booth’s biography and career, see Phelan (1988) and Antczak (1995b). A bibliography of Booth’s most important out-put and some discussions of his work can be found in Artz (1995).

88 On responses to The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth 1961) in the years immedi-ately following its publication, see 2.1.1 below. See Stanzel (2002b, 34) on the success with which The Rhetoric of Fiction sold; when Stanzel was writ-ing there had been ‘over twenty reprints … since 1961’ (‘mehr als 20 Re-prints … seit 1961’; my translation).

89 Booth (1961, xiii).


saw literary works as ethically normative worlds, and so he devel-oped a rhetoric of the epic text that was concerned primarily with the narrative means used to put across a system of values to the re-cipient. His central concern was to be ‘the heightening or suppres-sion not of simple curiosity but of moral and emotional engagement with the characters’.90

Interest in the rhetorical communication of ethical positions was still a defining feature in Booth’s later scholarly work.91 He had even begun developing this interest before he arrived in Chicago and came into contact with the circle around Crane and McKeon; it evidently originated in the experiences he had when spending two years as a designated clergyman for the Mormon Church in Utah.92

On several occasions, Booth himself draws attention to the bio-graphical roots of the rhetorical and ethical thread running though his work. For example:

My most overt missionary work, from the time when I was literally a mission-ary for the Mormon church on, has largely been centered … on how persons, characters, and selves, real or literary, are made and improved or debased by rhetoric. In the hierarchy of goods served or harmed by rhetoric, the quality of rhetors and their hearers has indeed been my center.93

It may never be possible to discover exactly when Booth decided to apply his interest in the communicative transmission of moral val-ues to the study of literary works. We can be sure, however, that the

90 Booth (1983b, 137). 91 See, for example, Booth (1983a, 417–18; 1988; 1998b; 2001a), and also the

controversy between Booth and Posner in the Philosophy and Literature jour-nal (Posner 1997, 1998; Booth 1998c). Johnstone (1995), the only study to date of Booth’s project of an ethics of fiction, provides little more than a number of largely unconvincing observations.

92 On this period and Booth’s movement from rigid advocacy of Mormonism to the pluralistic study of rhetoric, see Booth’s own ‘Confessions of an Aging, Hypocritical Ex-Missionary’ (Booth 1998a).

93 Booth (1995, 284). See also Booth (1970, 344) or Phelan (1988, 51). Booth said some years ago that he was working on a book about the rhetorical analysis of religious positions; the working title of the project was ‘Shared Ground and Rival Passions: Toward a Rhetoric of “Religions”, Official and Disguised’ (see Booth 1997, 50).


basic ideas of his later programme took shape while he was still studying as a postgraduate in Chicago, even if he did not begin work on The Rhetoric of Fiction until 1954 and initially saw the project as a study in poetics, only much later coming to see it as a work on rhetoric.94 Even in Chicago, Booth was aware that the problems with which he was dealing were basically rhetorical ones—he remembered ‘working toward an MA four-hour examina-tion on Aristotle’s Rhetoric’ and ‘suddenly realizing, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been up to”’.95 Even here, too, he became convinced of the position that was to be the starting point of his argument in The Rhetoric of Fiction: the thesis that there is no escaping the author’s presence in the text. Before its later appearance in The Rhetoric of Fiction, this position had a crucial role in Booth’s 1952 PMLA es-say on ‘The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tris-tram Shandy’, which was based on his doctoral thesis of two years earlier. In the opening section of the essay, Booth did not just give voice to his theory about the importance of the author; he also in-troduced in passing the key concept of his 1961 study of narrative rhetoric:

… it is evident that in all written works there is an implied narrator or ‘author’ who ‘intrudes’ in making the necessary choices to get his story or his argu-ment or his exposition written in the way he desires. He decides to tell this story rather than any other story; he employs his proof rather than any other possible proof. In short, he writes ‘this’ rather than ‘that’, and is thus fully characterized as an artist; he ‘intrudes’ at every step, however unobtrusively. But this kind of intrusion clearly cannot be treated as a single device.96

94 On the genesis of The Rhetoric of Fiction, see Booth (1988, 19). Booth (2001b) tells us that he did not begin using the term ‘rhetoric’ when writing The Rhetoric of Fiction ‘until at least 2/3rds of the way through the seven years’.

95 Booth (1998a, 19). Even in the 1950s, Booth seems to have taken rhetoric as his conceptual starting point; in his Rhetoric of Rhetoric, he defines it as fol-lows: ‘In short, rhetoric will be seen as the entire range of resources that hu-man beings share for producing effects on one another’ (Booth 2004, xi; em-phasis in original).

96 Booth (1952, 164; emphasis in original).


In discussing such ‘implied narrators or “authors”’, then, Booth was already, in 1952, concerned with the questions that lie at the heart of The Rhetoric of Fiction. In his treatment of the tradition of the self-conscious narrator, moreover, he already displayed particular inter-est in the moral effect of narratorial intrusions on the readers of lit-erary works: ‘Perhaps the intrusions which are most clearly func-tional’, he remarks with respect to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, ‘are those which are used to characterize the potential readers morally, and to manipulate the real readers into the moral attitudes Fielding desires.’97

Thus, the above ideas about a combined ethical and rhetorical mode of literary analysis first began taking shape around 1950. The following discussion of The Rhetoric of Fiction will show how Booth subsequently developed them. The third part of the mono-graph is of central importance for our purposes: in it, Booth turned the idea of the implied author, merely an aside in 1952, into a key component in his study of narrative rhetoric. The result was a con-cept that has given rise to ceaseless discussions during the past four decades.

1.2.1 The Implied Author and The Rhetoric of Fiction

The Rhetoric of Fiction consists of three parts, each of which con-tains several chapters. If we examine the structure of the book’s argument, however, it becomes apparent that it actually proceeds in two stages. The first aims to justify the idea of putting forward a rhetorical account of narrative literature, and the second is designed to put the idea into practice.

In the first part of the monograph, ‘Artistic Purity and the Rheto-ric of Fiction’,98 Booth explains why a rhetoric of narrative is needed. Booth takes issue here with maxims demanding that the

97 Booth (1952, 177). 98 Booth (1961, 3–165).


author be excluded from the epic genre. The typical line put forward in this widespread view, which had been influential in poetics since the nineteenth century, would be something like this: literature should communicate fictive stories and imagined worlds by show-ing rather than telling. Another equally widespread credo was the belief that authors should not allow themselves to be drawn into commenting on the events and characters in their works. Again and again, Booth rebuts suggestions of this kind by pointing out that the author can be made to vanish from the text only on a superficial level, if at all. He argues that, because literature is always the prod-uct of processes of selection and arrangement, it is ultimately im-possible to implement the principle of eliminating the author from literature: ‘the author’s voice is never really silenced’.99 As early as the first chapter, Booth summarizes his position as follows:

In short, the author’s judgement is always present, always evident for anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear.100

For Booth, against the background of this insight, the rhetorical analysis of literary texts was not merely legitimate—it was an ab-solute necessity. It was high time to explain the different forms in which authors could show themselves in their works.101

Booth devoted the second and third parts of The Rhetoric of Fic-tion to putting this plan into practice. In part 2, ‘The Author’s Voice in Fiction’,102 he began by returning to the ideas of his 1952 PMLA

99 Booth (1961, 60). 100 Booth (1961, 20). On this position, see also Hale (1998, 64–77). 101 In the afterword to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth

(1983a, 408) comments on this issue as follows: ‘To me it is now clear that the subject of the rhetoric of narration is in principle universal to all telling of stories; the only narratives that might flummox it would be those generated by computers or randomized programs. Even about those, the subject would become pertinent as soon as a human reader found that narrative sense could be made out of the printout.’

102 Booth (1961, 166–266).


essay and considering the types, strategies, and effects of narratorial commentaries in epic texts. His theses here were based primarily on case studies of Tom Jones (Henry Fielding), Tristram Shandy (Lau-rence Sterne), and Emma (Jane Austen). In part 3, ‘Impersonal Nar-ration’, he then turned to the rhetorical structures of texts designed according to the principle of authorial silence.103 With analyses of narratives such as The Liar and The Turn of the Screw (Henry James), he sought to illustrate how author-reader communication was affected by the employment of neutral narrative modes instead of individualized narrator figures in the epic. This tendency had been evident since the late nineteenth century and did not meet with Booth’s approval. He was convinced that it meant literature was throwing its recipients into moral confusion or at least denying them the source of ethical orientation with which it was obliged to pro-vide them.104 This is a distinctly dubious assumption in and of itself; by expressing it in sweeping invectives against literary modernism, Booth exposed himself to a certain amount of criticism, which we shall not consider in detail here.105

Booth’s programme of a rhetoric of fiction distanced him not only from the ideas current in the discussion of poetics in the 1960s but also from dominant opinion in academic debates on the study of literature. The New Criticism held a position of unassailable superi-ority in the study of literature in North America during the 1950s and 1960s; in such an environment, a new approach was bound to be seen as a provocation if it defined texts ‘not primarily as mean-ing or being but as doing’,106 and thus took considerable interest in

103 Booth (1961, 268–398). 104 Booth did not simply reject individual works for what he saw as their de-

structive effect; he actually identified a suspicious tendency towards irony in the course of literary history since the fin de siècle: ‘the last several decades have produced … an audience that has been thrown off balance by a barrage of ironic works’ (Booth 1961, 366). For Booth’s later appraisal of literary modernism, see Booth (1968, 85–87; 1983a, 417–19).

105 See 2.1.1 below. 106 Booth (1968, 85; emphasis in original). Booth is alluding here to the declara-

tion ‘A poem should not mean / But be’ in Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Ars Po-etica’.


author-recipient communication, intended effects, and readers’ im-pressions.107 A remark Booth made in 1968 about the intellectual climate when The Rhetoric of Fiction was published shows just how poor the prospects were for an attempt to analyse literary texts from an ethically oriented rhetorical perspective:

A generation had to come to accept without thinking that a true ‘poem’ (inclu-ding fiction) should not mean but be. With the author ruled out under the ‘in-tentional fallacy’ and the audience ruled out under the ‘affective fallacy’, with the world of ideas and beliefs ruled out under the ‘didactic heresy’ and with narrative interest ruled out under the ‘heresy of plot’ some doctrines of auton-omy had become so desiccated that only verbal and symbolic interrelation-ships remained.108

As a student of the Chicago school, Booth had early on adopted a sceptical attitude to the New Critics, above all when the maxims behind their mode of interpretation were taken too far or treated as dogma. Nonetheless, he appears to have believed that the warnings against intentional and affective fallacies were perfectly justified when he was working on The Rhetoric of Fiction.109 Even in his Rhetoric of Irony (1974), in the preface to which he explicitly stated that he had been influenced by Eric D. Hirsch’s intentionalistic the-ory of interpretation,110 Booth did not reject the idea of the inten-tional fallacy out of hand:

Talk about the ‘intentional fallacy’ is sound insofar as it reminds us that we cannot finally settle our critical problems by calling Voltaire on the telephone and asking him what he intended with his sentence about rival kings. Our best evidence of the intentions behind any sentence in Candide will be the whole Candide.111

In summary, the project of undertaking a rhetorical study of literary works presented Booth with two conflicting objectives. On the one

107 In his Rhetoric of Irony, Booth described the interaction between author and recipient as a ‘pas de deux’ (Booth 1974, 33).

108 Booth (1968, 84–85). 109 See, for example, the explicit references to the fallacies denounced by the

New Criticism in Booth (1961, 6, 386). 110 Booth (1974, xiii). 111 Booth (1974, 11). On the context of this remark, see Booth (1974, 126 n. 13).


hand, he wanted to bring author and recipient back into focus in the academic study of literature; on the other hand, he wanted to avoid stepping outside the work itself and thus committing one of the fal-lacies that the New Criticism had established as heresies of inter-pretation theory.

Booth thought it might be possible to escape from this dilemma by turning to the entity known as the implied author, which he had introduced in his 1952 discussion of the self-conscious narrator without attaching particular importance to it at the time. He seems to have been made aware of the concept’s potential by ‘The Tale and the Teller’, Kathleen Tillotson’s 1959 inaugural lecture at Bed-ford College, London. In it, Tillotson, herself drawing on Booth’s PMLA essay,112 described as ‘simple-minded’ the hope of many modern authors that the epic could be freed of all its rhetorical im-plications by doing away the ‘narrator in person’: ‘we are being di-rected all the while, by selection and emphasis and tone. Technical-ly “invisible”, the author remains as a subliminal advertiser, a hid-den persuader.’113 To show what she meant by this idea of an author (or narrator) who is not necessary visible, but nonetheless present, in every text, Tillotson referred to a comment the critic and poet Edward Dowden had made about the work of George Eliot:

The ‘narrator’ … is a method rather than a person; indeed the ‘narrator’ never is the author as man; much confusion has arisen from the identification, and much conscious art has been overlooked. Writing on George Eliot in 1877, Dowden said that the form that most persists in the mind after reading her novels is not any of the characters, but ‘one, who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them’. The ‘second self’, he goes on, is ‘more substantial than any mere human per-sonality’, and has ‘fewer reserves’; while ‘behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism’.114

112 Tillotson (1959, 12–13). 113 Tillotson (1959, 7). 114 Tillotson (1959, 15). The concept of the mock reader, put forward by Walker

Gibson in 1950, must also have played an important role in encouraging the introduction of the implied author, see Gibson (1950), and Booth (1961, 138).


Building on Tillotson’s remarks, Booth so to speak reintroduced the implied author concept in the third chapter of his Rhetoric of Fic-tion.115 In the 1952 essay, it had not been accompanied by closer explanation; this time, Booth set about defining its meaning more clearly. He did so in the form of a series of paraphrases, clearly un-aware in the process that it was by no means obvious that the vari-ous definitions he suggested were compatible with one another. The basis for Booth’s attempts at defining the implied author alternated between the work, its writer, and its reader. He explained the con-cept as the ‘core of norms and choices’ in a text, as an ‘implied ver-sion’ of the author in his works, and finally as a ‘picture the reader gets’ when receiving novels, narratives, stories.116

Booth gave a somewhat clearer outline of the concept than that drawn by the descriptions cited above when he set it apart from re-lated theoretical and critical concepts. First, he drew a fundamental difference between the implied author of a text and its narrator:

‘Persona’, ‘mask’, and ‘narrator’ … commonly refer to the speaker in the work who is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author and who may be separated from him by large ironies. ‘Narrator’ is usually taken to mean the ‘I’ of a work, but the ‘I’ is seldom if ever identical with the implied image of the artist.117

Second, Booth distinguished his concept from others such as those of style, tone, theme, and moral. As with the narratorial entity, Booth felt, concepts of this kind drew attention only to certain inter-esting aspects of literary texts, if that, whereas the implied author concept was intended to stand for the text as a whole:

Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of the

115 Booth’s introduction of the concept with reference to the term ‘second self’ as used by Dowden and then Tillotson may explain why he claims only to have coined the expression ‘implied author’, not to have come up with the idea itself. See Booth (1998c, 393), in which he says that he ‘invented the term, though not the concept, of “implied author”’.

116 Booth (1961, 70–74). 117 Booth (1961, 73).


completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is com-mitted, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form.118

Third, and finally, Booth sought to make clear the difference be-tween the implied author and the concept of the author itself. His basic line of reasoning followed one of the central arguments with which the New Criticism had criticized intentionalistic interpreta-tions. In their famous essay on the intentional fallacy, Beardsley and Wimsatt had proposed among other things that, as there is no guar-antee that what is intended will be the same as what is actually achieved, it is not appropriate to consider authorial intentions when interpreting literature.119 So, Wimsatt and Beardsley suggested, when studying a work, one should aim not to establish what its writer meant it to say, but to use linguistic rules to determine what it actually means.120 Booth wanted to take account of this maxim without abandoning the idea that literary works represent intention-ally structured normative worlds about which moral judgements can be made. Thus, he suggested that the implied author be distin-guished from the empirical author and treated as the entity that wants to express exactly what the text means. Booth left open the question of whether this proposal was meant to be an empirical statement about the meaning of texts or to specify an objective (by definition a fixed one) to be pursued when interpreting them: ‘The “implied author” chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices.’121

In retrospect, Booth described the introduction of the implied author as a conceptual consequence of the tendency he developed at an early date to ‘deal with the text as a person, or … as the act of a person’; he saw the concept as an expression of his conviction that

118 Booth (1961, 73–74; emphasis in original). 119 For an analysis of the complex argumentation employed by Wimsatt and

Beardsley, see the reconstructions in Danneberg and Müller (1983) and Dickie and Wilson (1995).

120 See Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946, 4–5). 121 Booth (1961, 74–75).


literature was not just about meanings but also and always about ‘love or hate, admiration or detestation, good or bad fellowship, domination or seduction’.122 When we retrace the emergence of the concept in detail, however, we cannot but feel that Booth’s own representation of the situation tries to portray as a well thought-through proposition something that was really the outcome of a dif-ficult compromise. Booth was convinced that he could not simply ignore central interpretive doctrines of the New Criticism, but he also believed it was necessary to subject literary works to ethical appraisal. The implied author helped him to reconcile these two as-pirations—it made it possible for him to pursue a programme of combined rhetorical and ethical literary analysis without having to bring the empirical author into play.123

The introduction of the implied author, then, does not just show how tightly the dogmas of contemporary literary criticism con-strained Booth when he formulated his approach. The way in which he introduced the concept also reveals something that the presenta-tion of his project otherwise tends to obscure: his debt to the Chi-cago school of criticism in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth certainly distanced himself clearly from the ideas of the Chicago critics by taking as his starting point the assumption that narrative texts pur-sue ‘moral ends with rhetorical means’.124 But, at its core, the pro-gramme that Booth developed on this foundation corresponded to the concept of literary criticism that his teachers, Crane, McKeon, and Olson, had developed on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of causality. The introduction of the implied author shows that Booth, like the founders of the Chicago school, hoped to develop a sophis-ticated way of analysing the form of literary texts, an approach

122 Booth et al. (1980, 66). 123 This thesis appeared at an early date; see Lodge (1962) and Swiggart (1963),

and also Killham (1966). See also Juhl (1980a, 179), and Polletta (1984, 111).

124 Bode (1995, 334). ‘Mit rhetorischen Mitteln einen moralischen Zweck’ (my translation). As we have seen (see 1.1.2 above), the supporters of the Chicago school were interested neither in rhetorical perspectives on literature nor in the ethical aspects of responses to it.


whose scope was intended to include the individual elements in a given work, their strategic function in it, and their effect on its re-ception. And, like his teachers, he hoped to put this programme of literary criticism into practice without referring to the empirical writers and readers of texts.125 In reality, then, Booth had simply ad-ded an ethical component to the programme of the Chicago critics and provided a catchy term for the concept he developed in the process. This is indirectly apparent from his introduction to a two-volume selection of essays by Crane that was published as The Idea of the Humanities in 1967. When using Crane as an example with which to outline the Chicago school’s position regarding literary criticism, Booth returned to formulations he had used to define the implied author in earlier work of his own:

… no literary work is essentially explained until we have discovered the ‘rea-sons of art’ that make it what it is—the rationale which determined the artist’s choices, conscious or unconscious, as he made this unique construction rather than some other possible construction.126

While taking up and extending the Chicago critics’ ideas on inter-pretation theory, however, Booth clearly distanced himself from their metatheoretical views as developed by McKeon and Olson in particular. Although he does not engage in any metatheoretical re-flection on the status of his own programme in The Rhetoric of Fic-tion, the way in which Booth presents his interpretations shows that studying the rhetorical structure of texts was not, for him, one among many ways of approaching literature. His anti-pluralistic at-titude is clearly expressed in the following retrospective summary of the credo behind the theory of interpretation he advocated in the 1950s and 1960s (we are not told here whether his position was meant to reflect empirical reality or expressed a normative ideal): ‘all good literary works demand finally one single right reading; if a work is great it is unified, and if a work is unified it demands of the

125 This basic similarity between Booth’s approach and that of the Chicago school is often overlooked (as, for example, in Baker 1977).

126 Booth (1967, xvii). See also, for example, Booth (1961, 74–75; 1982, 21).


reader that he or she discover the unity’.127 According to Booth, every literary text has one and only one implied author, and identi-fying this implied author is always a necessary component of the correct interpretation of a work. From this perspective, a text can give rise to differing interpretations only if its implied author is mistakenly identified or assessed in different ways. Booth also turned on its head the relationship that the founding fathers of the Chicago school had drawn between pluralism and Aristotelianism. For the Chicago critics around Crane and McKeon, a pluralistic metatheory had been the prerequisite for an Aristotelian analytical model; for Booth, Aristotelianism was the basis of pluralism.128

Only in the course of the 1970s did he gradually come to subscribe to the pluralist view of interpretation theory that the Chicago school had advocated three decades earlier. In the afterword to the 1983 edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth said of the 1961 version that

On the one hand, there is the implicit claim throughout, one that I still hold to, that rhetorical inquiry is universally applicable, that no fiction can fail to yield interesting stuff when we look at it through this lens. On the other hand, I scarcely mention the problem of how such universal usefulness relates to the radical limitations of my chosen questions and my methods for pursuing them. I wish I could now add a short chapter on ‘pluralism’, showing how our choices of a given inquiry work like our choices of optical instruments, each camera or microscope or telescope uncovering what other instruments conceal and obscuring what other instruments bring into focus.129

127 Booth (1997, 52; emphasis in original). 128 We do not consider the reconstructions put forward in Booth (1982, 1983a)

and Richter (1982) appropriate in this respect. 129 Booth (1983a, 405; emphasis in original). See also Booth (1979), Comstock

(1984), and Phelan (1988).


1.2.3 The Implied Author after The Rhetoric of Fiction

Booth remained confident in his implied author concept and ap-proach to literary criticism until his death. One of the latest restate-ments of his faith in the central concept of The Rhetoric of Fiction can be found in a piece that he wrote in response to Richard A. Pos-ner’s essay ‘Against Ethical Criticism’ in 1988.130 In his reply to Posner,131 Booth sought once again to show that the academic study of literature, if it is to go beyond simply reconstructing textual structures, must engage with the moral dimension of literary texts. He tells us that ‘ethical criticism cannot be avoided, when we hon-estly think about what and whom we meet when we engage in any story’.132 For Booth, this immediately means that any serious con-sideration of a work must take its implied author into account:

The true issue is … faced only when we think about the full engagement that we enter when stories’ implied authors hook us into their virtual worlds, im-plying their own judgments or placements of characters on an ethical scale. That engagement is not just with a gripping story about this or that portrayed character, or even with the narrator—though even this lands us into ethical territory. The full engagement is with the chooser, the molder, the shaper: an implied author.133

Nearly all of Booth’s comments on the implied author during the past four decades have had a similar message. He avoided becom-ing involved in the various disputes that the concept generated fol-lowing the publication of The Rhetoric of Fiction. In what he said, as a rule, he confined himself to asserting the relevance of the im-plied author in literary criticism, to considering applications of the concept, and to paraphrasing its definition. Rarely did Booth’s views on the implied author after 1961 deviate even slightly from the picture presented in The Rhetoric of Fiction; and when they did, it was only with respect to details of its definition. In a conversation with Norman Holland und Wolfgang Iser for the journal Diacritics

130 Posner (1997). 131 Booth (1998c); see also Booth (2002, 2005). 132 Booth (1998c, 376). 133 Booth (1998c, 377).


in 1980, for example, Booth conceded that he had long had too sim-plistic a picture of the implied author and the way its reconstruction takes place. Over the years, he said, it had become clear to him that the concept does not necessarily coincide with the totality of the norms that can be read out of a work:

I have slowly discovered that my own discussion of the implied author in The Rhetoric of Fiction was too simple … . It seemed at times to say that the au-thor we find implied in texts has cut off all his moorings with the ‘real world’, and it thus led some readers into awkward ways of talking about how we in fact do make valid inferences from implied authors to real authors. But both the author and the reader in the text are not simple, single, credulous folk who believe in all the norms of the work, including beetle-metamorphosis: they are complex folk who can pretend to believe and yet remember that they are pre-tending.134

Taking this train of thought further, in an essay of 1997 Booth came to the conclusion that the implied author of a text could be more than just a highly complex entity; he now believed it was possible that there were many works in which it could not be grasped as an unambiguous whole: ‘Too often in my early work I suggested a total communion between two utterly confident, secure, correct, and wise human beings at the top of the human heap: the implied author and me. Now I see an implied author who is manifold’.135

When Booth did propose refinements of how the implied author was to be understood, as in the two examples discussed above, he was always prompted to do so by the impression that use of the concept in its current form did not lead to adequate descriptions of empirical interpretive processes. He saw no reason to doubt that his efforts to define the concept were formally well-formed and his deliberations clear, unambiguous, and consistent. Neither in The Rhetoric of Fiction itself nor in his later work did Booth attempt to determine the exact relationship between his various definitions of the implied author, let alone draw together the competing descrip-tions he suggested for it. He did not, for example, note that the re-peated attempts to elucidate the concept in The Rhetoric of Fiction

134 Booth et al. (1980, 68). 135 Booth (1997, 58; emphasis in original).


left a number of important questions unanswered. The two main points of confusion that marked his treatment of the implied author quickly became apparent in discussion of the concept soon after its introduction.136 Both points of difficulty stem from a fundamental uncertainty as to whether Booth’s rhetoric is meant as an empirical theory of reception or a normatively based theory of interpreta-tion.137 In Booth’s treatment, (1) the role of the implied author in literary communication is obscure and (2) there is no methodologi-cal information about how the implied author of a work should be identified, which means that its epistemic status is also unclear. These areas of uncertainty in Booth’s definition of his key concept are important factors in its reception, so it will be useful to discuss them briefly in more detail here.

(1) In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth repeatedly pointed out that the concept of the author should be distinguished from that of the implied author. At no point in the entire monograph, however, did he explain exactly where they stood in relation to one another. Quite the opposite: he alternated constantly between two descriptions of the relationship between author and implied author, and it is by no means obvious that these descriptions are compatible with one an-other. On the one hand, he suggested the implied author is brought into being by the empirical author. Following Tillotson, Booth as-sumed that authors, when they make texts, always create images of themselves in the process: ‘As he writes,’ Booth believed, every writer of a literary text ‘creates not simply an ideal, impersonal “man in general” but an implied version of “himself’ that is differ-ent from the implied authors we meet in other men’s works’.138 On the other hand, however, Booth described the implied author as an

136 See 2.1 below. 137 On this distinction, see Spree (1995) and Winko (1995). 138 Booth (1961, 70–71). See also especially Booth (1961, 144): ‘to pass judge-

ment where the author intends neutrality is to misread. But to be neutral or objective where the author requires commitment is equally to misread’. Examples of Booth’s conviction regarding this point can be found in his com-ments on the implied author in Booth (1961, 138; 1996, 242; 2005, 78), and Booth et al. (1977, 10–11).


inference made by real recipients. According to this second defini-tion, the author should not be seen as the creator of the implied au-thor; he simply provides, intentionally or unintentionally, the mate-rial out of which the latter is constructed. From this perspective, the implied author is the image that readers make of a text’s writer when reading that text: ‘however impersonal he [the author] may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner’.139 Now, it is clearly problematic to see the implied author as both an author-image produced by the recipient and a self-image created by the author. Nonetheless, Booth stuck to these two definitions of the concept from their introduction in The Rhetoric of Fiction until his death in 2005.140 A recent illus-tration of this can be found in the piece we mentioned above in which Booth responds to Posner’s attack on an ethically oriented approach to literature. Here, alongside passages that describe the implied author as an inference made by the recipient, we encounter repeated formulations that are difficult to reconcile with such an understanding. For example:

The Mark Twain we live with reading Huck Finn is not the complex flesh-and-blood Samuel Clemens but the person who has sloughed off all charac-teristics except those that strengthen the story; the real Clemens has created the superior Twain that we engage with.141

139 Booth (1961, 71). 140 See most recently Gomel (2004, 87): the use of Booth’s concept, she ob-

serves, is marked by a ‘strange duality’: ‘occasionally the implied author seemed to absorb everything in the text, and occasionally she dwindled to a textual double of the real writer’.

141 Booth (1998c, 377). See also Booth’s retrospective portrayal of the first three generations of the Chicago school in Booth (1982). In it, he tries to show, among other things, that intentionalism was always an integral part of the Chicago critics’ approach. He begins by treating intentionalism as the ap-proach taken to literary texts when, like them, he ‘pursued the result of all the choices the author had in fact made, whether consciously or unconsciously’. This first paraphrase of the Chicago interpretive programme is followed by another, according to which Booth, like the other representatives of the Chi-cago school, had always been concerned with the intentions of the real author when analysing texts: ‘the purpose of interpretation is to come as close as


(2) The Rhetoric of Fiction left open not only the question of how the implied author was defined, but also that of how it was to be reconstructed. Not once in the entire book did Booth even begin to try to describe in any detail how the implied author of a literary text can be discovered on the basis of that text.142 Presumably, Booth did not give the necessary attention to such issues because, as we have seen, he believed there was no need to decide whether his term stood for the self-image of the author or the author-image of the reader. According to one of his views, the implied author was a con-struct made by the empirical recipient, and he explicitly stated in this respect that the presence of authors in their texts could only be recognized by someone ‘who knows how to look for it’.143 Yet, despite this assumption, he saw no reason to indicate how such a search might proceed, what steps it should involve, or what methods should be followed and what rules observed during it. Booth clearly considered comment on such matters to be superfluous because he assumed that the construction of the implied author would be guided unambiguously by—the implied author. Correspondingly, The Rhetoric of Fiction says regarding the presence of authors in texts that ‘it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects’.144 Even by the time of his death, Booth had not closed this remarkable methodological gap in his many treatments of the implied author. Even if he seemed to see more clearly than he did at the time of The Rhetoric of Fic-tion that analysing literature with the tools of rhetoric is only one interpretive programme among many, he continued to treat recon-structing the implied author as a privileged mode of textual inter-pretation:

I always attacked the anti-intentionalists as confusing two intentions: the pos-sible (inferred) intentions of the flesh-and-blood author—quoted in his jour-

possible to sitting in the author’s chair and making this text, becoming able to remake it, employing the author’s “reason-of-art”’ (Booth 1982, 21).

142 See Phelan (1992). 143 Booth (1982, 20). 144 Booth (1961, 71).


nals, his letters, his conversation—and the actual intentions as revealed in the totality of his or her choices.’145

The following study of the concept’s reception will show that its popularity and widespread dissemination in the text-based disci-plines are due above all to the very points of uncertainty that char-acterized Booth’s definitions of it in The Rhetoric of Fiction andafter.

145 Booth (2001b; our emphasis). In the same year, Booth (2001a, 103–4) made a very similar comment in his essay ‘Literary Criticism and the Pursuit of Character’: ‘some kinds of stories … contain within themselves a kind of ethical education that makes them almost certain to be elevating for any reader who is qualified to understand the stories at all. … A lot of critics on our scene would claim that everything depends on the reader. But what I want to say is that although a lot depends on the reader, much of the quality of the experience depends on the quality of the text itself’.

2 Between Interpretation Theory and Narratology: The Reception of the Implied Author Concept

Few concepts in cultural studies have given rise to a debate as in-tense and controversial as that which has surrounded the implied author since it was introduced. The concept has been eliciting re-sponses ranging from devastating criticism to passionate advocacy for over four decades, and, if the range of recent work on it is any-thing to go by, the controversy is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future.1 The debate, that is to say, shows no signs of stopping. A not insignificant reason for this, we suggest, is the fact that advocates and opponents alike have not given sufficient attention to the his-tory of the concept’s reception. The discussion is now well into its fourth decade, but it has still failed to produce a critical survey containing an overview of the debate, an appraisal of the various positions adopted regarding the implied author, and a systematic treatment of the contexts in which they took shape. We hope to fill this gap in the following pages.

Going through the implied author controversy in historical order is not the main concern of our treatment of the concept’s reception. Such an approach would doubtless lead to interesting conclusions about certain aspects of the nature of argument and debate in the humanities. It does not seem likely, however, that a chronological analysis of this kind would provide a convenient source of guidance to refer to when explicating the concept. Thus, as explication is ul-timately our primary objective, we shall examine the implied author debate of the preceding decades typologically rather than retracing its historical course. We are, that is to say, concerned first and fore-most with reconstructing and classifying the different types of re-

1 Examples of such work include Lanser (2001), Nünning (2001a), Darby (2001, 2003), Abbott (2002), Heinen (2002), Jannidis (2002), Phelan (2005), and Booth (2005).

64 The Reception of the Implied Author Concept

sponse to which Booth’s concept has given rise.2 Even so, it will be useful to have at least a rough picture of the debate’s historical course in mind when undertaking this classification. We shall there-fore begin by presenting a model of the phases in which it has un-folded.

Essentially, our analysis of implied author reception applies to all references to the concept since its introduction. As well as consid-ering discussion of the concept in the academic study of literature, we shall refer to views expressed on it in other disciplines where it has occasionally been used but rarely been subjected to critical dis-cussion—psychology, theology, and film and media studies, for example. Because explication is our ultimate objective, our survey will focus primarily on those references to the implied author that, on the basis of more or less systematic reflection, develop ideas for elucidating or replacing the concept. However, our study of the con-cept’s reception will also consider applied and illustrative ways in which it has been used, and usages with more complex pretexts.3

Because we intend to reconstruct the reception of the implied author concept, not just that of the term, we must also consider the various alternative and competing categories that have joined it since the 1970s—Umberto Eco’s Model Author, Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader, Wolf Schmid’s abstract author, Kendall Walton’s apparent artist, Alexander Nehamas’s postulated author, and Greg-ory Currie’s fictional author, to name but a few prominent exam-ples. As they have generally been introduced outside the context of the discussion of Booth’s concept, their significance for the implied author debate must be determined separately in each case. For this reason, the various alternative categories are treated separately at the end of our survey of implied author reception and only then considered in terms of our typology of ways in which the concept has been used.4

2 We have Weber’s concept of the ideal type in mind here; see Weber (1904, 190–92; 1921, 19–22).

3 See Danneberg (1989b, 53) on the ways in which concepts are used. 4 The various author models developed in the context of formalism all closely

resemble the implied author in definition and function, but we shall pass over

Between Interpretation Theory and Narratology 65

In distinguishing between the different types of implied author reception described below, we have been guided by the central con-texts in which the concept has been discussed in the study of litera-ture. From this perspective, we see that the concept has been treated in relation to two main problems: the interpretation of literary texts on the one hand and the description of literary texts on the other. The first type of response—reception in relation to interpretation—covers use of the concept in work concerned with reconstructing the overall meaning of texts, whether with a general or specific focus.5The second type of response—reception in relation to description—covers use of the implied author in studies whose underlying con-cern lies in determining the detailed structures of literary works.6The relevant evidence shows that the former context, that of textual interpretation, contains two subtypes of implied author reception: references to the implied author in relation to interpretation can con-cern either its suitability as a key concept in interpretation theory or its role in interpretation in practice. Thus, we shall distinguish be-tween use of the concept in relation to interpretation theory on the one hand and in the relation to interpretation in practice on the other. Evidence from the discussion will be used to determine which of the various contexts individual references to the implied author belong to.7 In general, the resultant categorizations will con-cur with how those using the concept perceive their status in each case.8

them here, for, as far as we can see, the discussion of such proposals and the debate surrounding Booth’s concept have generally unfolded independently of one another. An overview of the various author models of formalism can be found in Schmid (2005).

5 On the concept of interpretation, see Spree (2000). On other kinds of inter-pretation which we do not consider here, see, for example, Novitz (2002), Bühler (2003), or Carlshamre and Pettersson (2003).

6 On the difference between interpretation and description, see 2.2.2 below. 7 There are of course some references to Booth’s concept which cannot be as-

signed to one of the differentiated contexts of implied author reception. See, for example, Knight (1979), Schippers (1981), Coney (1984), or Reid (1986).

8 Those positions on the implied author adopted in what we call the context of interpretation in practice (see 2.2.2 below) are an exception.


As our study of implied author reception will show, there is no consistent correlation between the contexts in which the concept has been used and the opinions that have been put forward regarding its usefulness. In interpretive contexts, both supporting and opposing voices have made themselves heard; in descriptive contexts, mean-while, the implied author has met with near-universal hostility, but even here its relevance to textual interpretation occasionally attracts a more positive response.9 When the implied author has met with agreement, our study looks at the ways of modelling the concept that have been put forward and the arguments advanced in support of them. When the concept has been rejected, our analysis aims to identify the points of criticism levelled against it and show whether any alternatives are proposed, and if so, what they are. Our treat-ment of positive and negative responses to the implied author in the contexts we describe is summarized in figure 1.

Fig. 1. Types of implied author reception

Before considering individually the three contexts in which the im-plied author has been used, we shall briefly review the most signifi-cant stages of the discussion surrounding it. If nothing else, we hope to give an outline of when the different types of reception took

9 These intricacies of implied author reception are not given sufficient attention in Kindt and Müller (1999).


shape and how their significance has changed in the course of the debate.

As we have seen, the implied author first appeared in Booth’s 1952 essay ‘The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy’.10 Wider discussion of the concept, however, be-gan only when reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction appeared on the scene. Those reviews that gave consideration to the concept used it to illustrate exemplary uses and disadvantages of the project of drawing up a rhetoric of literary works. The implied author debate, in other words, began as a dispute regarding interpretation theory. The discussion was given a new direction by John Killham’s 1966 essay ‘The “Second Self” in Novel Criticism’. This text contains the first attempt to examine the implied author independently rather than continuing to see it simply as the central concept in a rhetorical approach to literature. Another, more significant turning point in the controversy surrounding Booth’s concept, of course, was the pro-fessionalization of the study of narrative in the second half of the 1960s and its establishment in the academic study of literature dur-ing the 1970s.11 Discussion of the implied author underwent a fun-damental change in the course of this latter development. The concept continued to be discussed from the perspective of inter-pretation theory, but less and less prominently so as narratology became more and more successful. From 1970 onwards, textual de-scription and interpretation in practice became the central contexts of implied author reception. Since then, discussion of the concept

10 See 1.2.1 above. 11 See, for example, Stanzel (1992), Jahn (1995), Prince (1995a), Goebel

(1999), Darby (2001), Cornils and Schernus (2003), Herman (2005), and Fludernik (2005). It has now become common practice to use the designa-tions ‘Erzähltheorie’ (‘narrative theory’) and ‘narratology’ to distinguish be-tween different theoretical traditions in the study of narrative. We do not, however, find the case for this distinction convincing, even if the term ‘nar-ratology’ was introduced in the course of structuralism (Todorov 1969, 10) whereas the term ‘Erzähltheorie’ (‘narrative theory’) was already widespread in the 1950s (in, for example, Lämmert 1955, 62). On the background to these terminological issues, see most recently Darby (2001, 829–33), Stanzel (2002b, 49–52), and Kindt and Müller (2003c, 413–17).


has been concerned primarily with whether it can be integrated into the narratological analysis of literary texts, and if so, how. These stages in the historical evolution of responses to the concept are summarized in figure 2.

In the coming pages, we introduce the types and subtypes of the positions that have been adopted regarding the implied author one after the other. We begin our study by considering reception in rela-tion to interpretation theory (2.1). In the second stage of our survey, we turn to engagement with Booth’s concept in relation to inter-pretation in practice and then to discussion of the concept in relation to description (2.2). In the third and final part of our survey of implied author reception, we consider the numerous alternative and competing concepts that have been put forward in response to it (2.3).

Fig. 2. Stages in the reception of the implied author


2.1 The Implied Author in Relation to Interpretation Theory

2.1.1 The Reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction

The large number of reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction publishedbetween 1961 and 1964 show that the monograph attracted wide-spread attention in the academic study of literature in North Amer-ica as soon as it appeared. In the vast majority of cases, Booth’s ideas met with unmistakable approval.12 Most of his reviewers were positively inspired by the work; they assessed The Rhetoric of Fiction as a ‘landmark’,13 a ‘major critical work’,14 an ‘indispensa-ble book’,15 or the ‘most important treatise on the theory of fiction to appear since Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction in 1921’.16 Only a small number of critics expressed a different judgement in their reviews, noting with some surprise the euphoric response with which Booth’s monograph had met.17 In the view of these commen-tators, The Rhetoric of Fiction was really a ‘rather confused work’, one ‘more liable to engender confusion than to spread light on the theory of fiction’.18

Reviewers were divided over whether it was sensible, or even le-gitimate at all, to approach literary texts with a set of rhetorical

12 See Swiggart (1963, 142–43). Christadler (1963), Stanzel (1964), and Wei-mann (1967) show that Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction was soon noticed outside the United States as well, in this case in the German-speaking countries.

13 Wright (1962, 566). 14 Lodge (1962, 581). 15 Stegner (1961, 464). 16 Beebe (1961/62, 373). 17 Mays (1962, 84), for example, writes concerning the welcome given to

Booth’s work that ‘The Rhetoric of Fiction has had exceptionally favorable reviews. These reviews, it seems to me, fall into two classes; the merely un-intelligent, and the invalid.’ On this, see also Swiggart (1963, 143).

18 Mays (1962, 85).


tools.19 Some discussions of Booth’s book dealt with his concept of a rhetoric of narrative literature without considering his proposals for applying it to literary texts. Consequently, not all reviewers en-gaged with the implied author concept in any real depth. Even so, the majority shared the opinion expressed as follows by Mark Rob-erts in his piece in the journal Essays in Criticism: ‘the concept of the implied author is one which serves to unify a great part of Pro-fessor Booth’s argument’.20 The reviews of The Rhetoric of Fictioncan be divided into three groups on the basis of how they evaluate Booth’s interpretive programme and respond to his implied author concept.21

A small group of reviewers favoured the idea of analysing lit-erature from a rhetorical perspective but gave little or no attention to the concept of the implied author. The members of this group un-derstood the approach developed in The Rhetoric of Fiction as an intentionalistic theory of interpretation. Booth, in their view, took rhetoric to mean ‘the technique by which an author controls his reader’s responses’,22 as Diana Hehir, for example, succinctly put it in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Supporters of this position saw the implied author as a relatively insignificant element in a process of literary communication that was dependent primarily on the author himself. In the words of Alan McKillop, Booth thought literary analysis should cover all the participants in a com-munication situation defined as follows:

19 The commentaries on The Rhetoric of Fiction by the German-speaking writ-ers mentioned above are a basic exception. Christadler (1963, 37) understood Booth’s book as the ‘beginning of a “sociology” of narrative forms on a psy-chological basis’ (‘Anfang zu einer “Soziologie” der Erzählformen auf psy-chologischer Grundlage’; my translation), Stanzel read it as a contribution to narrative theory (see Stanzel 1964, 18–19, 28), and Weimann (1967, 307–9) saw it as a study in the theory of the novel that was designed from a rhetori-cal perspective but actually adopted a formalist one.

20 Roberts (1962, 329). 21 Because of their dates of publication, the reviews of Long (1981) and

Schwarz (1985) are considered later, in our analysis of implied author recep-tion in relation to interpretation in practice.

22 Hehir (1963/64, 487).


The total situation … includes the author as an historical person outside the work, the author’s second self as manifest in the work itself, such other re-porters as may be chosen for the narrative task in whole or in part, and the reader as he participates, expects, accepts, rejects.23

Booth’s popularity among this group of reviewers was due above all to the fact that he did not give a precise statement of the definition of the implied author; in particular, he did not make the distinction between the implied and the empirical author particularly clear.24

The second group of reviewers, by far the most substantial one, also supported Booth’s approach to the study of literature. In con-trast to those in the first group, however, they were convinced that the implied author had a key role to play in the rhetoric of epic texts. Like Booth himself, they believed that the concept made it possible to consider authors and recipients in literary analysis with-out violating the interpretive maxims of the New Criticism. This po-sition is clearly apparent, for example, in the review by Mark Ro-berts. He wrote regarding the implied author that

the term refers to the idea we form of ‘the author’, his values, beliefs, and at-titudes. It must be stressed that this is not an invitation to ‘inductive biogra-phy’, to the use of the book as a source of evidence for non-literary enquiries about the actual author as a person. The ‘implied author’ … is part of his book, part of its total effect: our consideration of the ‘implied author’ is a con-sideration of an aspect of the book, not a covert attempt to leave literary criti-cism and indulge into something else.25

The potential that this second group of reviewers saw in the implied author was even more clearly expressed by David Lodge in the Modern Language Review. His admiring discussion of the book lauded it for providing the poetics of the novel that the academic study of literature had been lacking for so long: ‘a “Poetics” of the novel … is what we have needed, and that is what Professor Booth has given us’.26 For Lodge, the quality of The Rhetoric of Fiction was due primarily to the implied author concept employed in the

23 McKillop (1962/63, 296). 24 See 1.2.3 above. 25 Roberts (1962, 328). 26 Lodge (1962, 580).


book, for this, he believed, made it possible to pursue previously ignored lines of enquiry in a theoretically acceptable manner:

‘Rhetoric’ is Professor Booth’s term for the means by which the writer makes known his vision to the reader and persuades him of its validity … . Professor Booth avoids the ‘intentional fallacy’ (which he regards, in any case with scepticism) by concentrating his attention on the ‘implied author’, that is, the author implied by the novel, and not the real, historic author, about whom our speculations are unlikely to be useful. The Fielding implied by Jonathan Wildis different from the Fielding implied by Tom Jones, and both are different from the real Henry Fielding.27

Lodge stands out here because he explicitly highlights the compro-mise inherent in Booth’s key concept, but his treatment of the book is otherwise typical of the second group of Rhetoric of Fiction re-views. They are distinguished by the fact that their analysis of Booth’s argument draws a close connection between the concept of the implied author and the project of analysing literature from a rhetorical point of view.28

The third group of reviewers, like the first a very small one, re-jected both Booth’s idea of a rhetorical approach to literature and his implied author concept. There is an unmistakable link between this position and the New Criticism tradition; those who adopted this view believed that The Rhetoric of Fiction was fundamentally flawed in both its overall conception and the individual studies it contained. In the journal Critique, for example, Milton Mays pro-tested that Booth’s rhetorical approach meant that he tended to en-quire after the writers of the literary works he analysed rather than concentrate on studying the texts themselves.29 Peter Swiggart ar-rived at a similar conclusion in his discussion of the monograph in The Sewanee Review, in which he wrote that ‘Mr. Booth … often bases his discussion of a particular novel upon an arbitrary inter-

27 Lodge (1962, 580). 28 On this connection, see also Stegner (1961, 467–68), Wright (1962, 567), or

Roberts (1962, 331). Stegner (1961, 464), however, also praises Booth’s book precisely because it reminds us of the author’s relevance.

29 See, for example, Mays (1962, 90): ‘Unable to locate value in form, Booth is forced to seek it outside the work.’


pretation of its theme as well as the beliefs and intentions of its au-thor’.30 Such views of The Rhetoric of Fiction were at work when the third group of reviewers read Booth’s idea of the implied author as an ineffectual attempt to prevent the New Criticism from finding fault with his programme of rhetorical interpretation:

The notion of the implied author who reflects the actual author’s attitudes and beliefs is a way of coping verbally with an author’s ability to project his per-sonality into a work of fiction and yet remain somehow detached. But Mr. Booth seems to employ the concept mainly as an excuse for dealing with the author’s own attitudes and values without falling victim, in an obvious way, to the intentional fallacy.31

To support this view, reviewers argued that Booth defined and used the implied author as a source of moral norms:

Mr. Booth makes much the same mistake that at one point he warns his reader against, that of confusing the author as man with the implied self he projects into his work. He conceives such an implied author in moral terms that are appropriate only to human individuals and not to their artistic creations.32

The third group of critics rejected the concept of the implied author just as they did the author category that it was meant to replace. Essentially, they were seeking to defend an orthodox form of the New Criticism against Booth’s programme of a new, rhetorically oriented approach to the study of literature.

However much they differed in detail, all three groups of reviews considered Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction against the background of the original context in which he had written the monograph. This perspective was soon to change.

30 Swiggart (1963, 143). See also Swiggart (1963, 157). 31 Swiggart (1963, 145–46). 32 Swiggart (1963, 159).


2.1.2 The Implied Author as the Key Concept in a Theory of Interpretation

The implied author debate changed fundamentally with the publica-tion of John Killham’s essay ‘The “Second Self” in Novel Criti-cism’ in The British Journal of Aesthetics in 1966. Killham’s piece was the first to see the implied author as something more than an aspect of The Rhetoric of Fiction: he explicitly examines the con-cept in terms of its implications for the debate about how to go about interpreting literary texts.33

As we shall see in the following reconstruction, the strand of the implied author debate that began with Killham’s essay has still not been resolved today. Even so, since the 1970s, this kind of discus-sion about the concept has been overshadowed by that which took shape with the establishment of narratology in the academic study of literature. This may be due not least to the fact that work on in-terpretation theory has tended to comment disparately on the im-plied author rather than engaging in an unbroken discussion of it. Work that treats the implied author as a placeholder for a theory of interpretation almost always does so by comparing Booth’s ap-proach with its own standpoint—always, that is to say, without taking earlier appraisals of the concept into consideration. Most work on the implied author in the context of interpretation theory has another typical feature, namely the underlying assumption (not normally stated explicitly) that arguments about rival ways of inter-preting literary texts can be empirically resolved.34 Responses to the implied author in the context of interpretation theory do occa-sionally consider the internal consistency of Booth’s deliberations, but the crucial factor in their evaluation of the concept is always the question of whether the implied author provides a satisfactory way

33 See below for a full discussion of Killham’s approach. 34 For further treatment of this perspective on the problem of interpretation, see,

for example, Danneberg and Müller (1981, 1983, 1984a, 1984b), Stout (1982, 1986), Hermerén (1983), Müller (1984, 2000), Danneberg (1999), or Strube (1993, 2000).


of representing what works mean or how they are received.35 The empirical adequacy of the concept is what matters; in no case is any thought given to evaluating it on the basis of its pragmatic useful-ness in specific circumstances in the study of literature.

We shall begin our appraisal of the discussion of Booth’s con-cept in the context of interpretation theory by turning to those cases in which it has been positively received, and then consider the dis-tinctly more numerous negative reactions. The responses that see the concept as a useful one can be split into two subgroups on the basis of how they receive it.

The first subgroup consists of a series of responses that assume without qualification that the implied author has an important place in the theory of interpreting literary texts. However, few represen-tatives of this position integrate the concept directly into their own particular approach to interpretation theory without commenting on it in the process. Instead, as a rule, adoption of the concept is ac-companied by a number of explicatory remarks on it or its place in a wider conceptual context. Usually without it being pointed out ex-plicitly, these explanations allow some of the imprecisions in Booth’s treatment of the implied author to be ironed out.

The numerous references to the concept in the work of Peter Rabinowitz are a good example of this variant of implied author re-ception. One of Booth’s students,36 Rabinowitz has been pursuing an aim that he described as follows in his 1987 book Before Read-ing: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation: ‘the project of developing a coherent theory of how people read nar-rative’.37 Following in Booth’s footsteps, Rabinowitz’s interest all along has lain not in empirically describing the behaviour of real readers but in analytically determining the reader-roles anticipated in literary works.38 The reader-role he associates with the authorial audience plays a key role in his approach. This reader-role embod-

35 As we shall see below, Blaim and Gruszewska (1994) is an exception here. 36 See Booth (1982, 24). 37 Rabinowitz (1987, 1). On the view of the implied author developed here, see

also Rabinowitz (1977, 1995), and Suleiman and Crosman (1980). 38 See Rabinowitz (1995, 383).


ies the way in which the author of a text expects the text to be re-ceived by readers in the ideal case. The concept of the authorial audience can also, however, serve as a norm against which to evalu-ate interpretations of a text.39 Thus, as Rabinowitz himself has re-peatedly pointed out, his approach is not really a theory of reception but instead presents a special kind of intentionalistic theory of inter-pretation:

The notion of the authorial audience is clearly tied to authorial intention but it gets around some of the problems that have traditionally hampered the discus-sion of intention by treating it as a matter of social convention rather than of individual psychology. In other words, my perspective allows us to treat the reader’s attempt to read as the author intended, not as a search for the author’s private psyche, but rather as the joining of a particular social/interpretive com-munity; that is, the acceptance of the author’s invitation to read in a particular socially constructed way that is shared by the author and his or her expected readers.40

Against the background of these ideas, Rabinowitz is able to treat the implied author as a terminological variant of the authorial audi-ence; he generally understands his and Booth’s key terms as two ways of referring to a single approach, each reflecting a different perspective on it.41 In a recent overview of various lines of thought in reception theory, Rabinowitz has again set out the reasoning be-hind his point of view and his decision to refer to Booth’s concept:

Although recognizing the importance of reviving close study of the author …, Booth is strongly influenced by the formalist heritage that resists biographical explanations of literary texts. He solves this dilemma by distinguishing the actual flesh-and-blood author from the ‘second self’ he or she chooses to pre-

39 See especially Rabinowitz (1987, 36): ‘authorial reading has a special status against which other readings can be measured (although not necessarily nega-tively); it is a kind of norm (although not necessarily a positive value), in that it serves as a point of orientation (although not necessarily as an ultimate des-tination). In short, authorial reading—in the sense of understanding the val-ues of the authorial audience—has its own kind of validity, even if, in the end, actual readers share neither the experiences nor the values presumed by the author.’

40 Rabinowitz (1987, 22). 41 Rabinowitz (1987, 23).


sent to us. … This image can be inferred from the particular choices mani-fested in the text.42

The second subgroup of positive responses to the implied author consists of those that approve of the concept on a general level but have major reservations about the particular form in which it ap-peared in Booth’s work. Like the exponents of the first subgroup, the representatives of this one do not dispute that the implied author category is in some way relevant to interpretation theory. Unlike them, however, they do not believe that minor corrections to Booth’s definition are all that is needed to make using the implied author a viable proposition. Instead, they proceed on the assumption that a fundamental reconceptualization of the concept is required. The necessity of such a revision is usually justified with reference to the problems that arise when we try to reconstruct the implied author of individual literary texts in practice. According to the the-sis behind this type of implied author reception, then, there are con-siderable limits to the use of Booth’s concept in its original guise. There are many texts where describing the nature of the implied au-thor is relatively straightforward, but, the argument goes, there are just as many novels and novellas where it is not.

An example of such a view can be found in the discussion that has been unfolding for some time in the study of literature in North America about whether a more dynamic view of Booth’s concept is needed. The dispute is centred on the idea that, instead of searching for the implied author, attention should be given to the implication process itself. The debate was set in motion by an essay in the jour-nal Narrative in which Elisabeth Preston attempts to characterize the implied author of The Great Gatsby.43 Whereas Booth clearly has no difficulties in drawing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel into his combined rhetorical and ethical analysis of literature, mentioning it a number of times in The Rhetoric of Fiction,44 Preston’s interpreta-tion concludes that it is not actually possible to obtain a coherent

42 Rabinowitz (1995, 383). 43 Preston (1997). 44 See, for example, Booth (1961, 158, 176).


impression of an implied author in the novel: ‘The Great Gatsbyexemplifies what I would like to call a dispossessed narrative, a text which does not possess a coherent implied author’.45 On the basis of this finding, Preston argues that Booth’s implied author concept must be redefined from the ground up:

I want to suggest a rhetoric of the implied author that goes beyond seeing him or her as a textual structure, as the force from whom originates the thematic and ethical touchstones offered to the flesh-and-blood-reader through the me-diating structure we call the authorial audience; I want to consider the idea of a dialogic implied author, multiple and fluid in his or her own identities, re-flecting and acting within, and even upon, an historical and literary era.46

Susan S. Lanser, who has had a two-sided attitude to Booth’s con-cept since the 1980s,47 has taken the path indicated here and set about systematically developing the ideas of Preston’s case study in her essay ‘(Im)plying the Author’. For Lanser, problems in deter-mining the implied author are not only posed by certain specific texts such as the example with which Preston illustrates her point—they are actually potentially present in all texts. ‘Texts manipulate’, she suggests, ‘a range of strategies that may evoke different notions of authorship’.48 Lanser’s ideas, then, amount to a radicalized ver-sion of Preston’s position: ‘I think we need to pass beyond the no-tion of the unified and coherent author …, and recognize that im-plied authors can be—and perhaps more often are—multiple per-sonalities.’49

It is easy to see that the ideas of Preston and Lanser fail to con-vince. The need to reconceptualize the implied author as they sug-gest presents itself only if we confuse two views of the concept that should really be distinguished from each another: one relating to empirical reception, the other to interpretation theory. If the concept

45 Preston (1997, 159). 46 Preston (1997, 153). As explained in 1.2.3 above, Booth arrived at a very

similar conclusion at the same time (see Booth 1997, 58). 47 See, for example, Lanser (1981, 120–22, 131, 151; 2005, 209–11). See also

2.2.2 below. 48 Lanser (2001, 155). 49 Lanser (2001, 157).


is understood as a category of interpretation theory, its definition is unaffected regardless of whether or not unambiguous interpretation is impossible in the case of some texts. Thus, in this context, it does not follow from observations such as those of Preston and Lanser that the concept should be redefined in any fundamental sense. In-stead, such comments should be understood as pointing to the lim-ited scope of the implied author and the interpretive programme as-sociated with it. If, on the other hand, the concept is seen as one re-lating to empirical reception rather than interpretation theory, the realization that texts can be understood in different ways should act as a stimulus for abandoning the implied author in favour of a dif-ferent model of how meaning is formed during reception.50 As a glance at recent empirical reading studies shows, an implied author with multiple personalities is unlikely to be a promising candidate for such a model. The implied author is either not affected at all by the observations of Preston and Lanser, or affected in ways that are different from what Preston and Lanser themselves assume.

Most treatments of the implied author in the context of interpre-tation theory oppose its use, seeing further elucidation of Booth’s concept as either unnecessary or impossible. As with the positive responses, it will be helpful to distinguish between two subgroups in the negative reactions. The first presents us with a small body of texts on interpretation theory whose criticism is relatively moderate. The stance taken by work in this subgroup does problematize Booth’s positions, but no more; it does not present an alternative approach to that of the implied author or the theory of interpretation associated with it. Representatives of this type of reception both reconstruct Booth’s ideas and criticise them, doing so against the background of notions of literature and its study that they do not elucidate in further detail.

An example of the kind of work with which we are concerned here is the essay by John Killham that has already been cited a number of times in the preceding pages. Killham based his piece on

50 We note in passing that such an understanding of the concept requires a dif-ferent form of discussion; see 3.1 below


two simultaneous developments that he detected: a crisis in the New Criticism in the 1960s and a concurrent reawakening of interest in the author.51 Although he expressly welcomes this change as a whole, Killham is equally committed in his scepticism towards the concepts that have been introduced or taken up in the process. Kill-ham’s doubts begin with the idea that the author always creates an image of himself, a second self, in all his works. In Killham’s view, the term ‘second self’, coined by Edward Dowden and brought to attention again by Kathleen Tillotson,52 brings with it the danger of confusing three central aspects of literary communication that should be distinguished from one another at all times:

These are: authors seated at tables with pens, or typewriters, or tape recorders; the imaginary persons whom they may invent as supposed tellers of their sto-ries; and finally the idea we have of the authors’ literary character when we speak of reading ‘Thackeray’ or ‘Dickens’ and so on.53

In Killham’s eyes, the concept of the implied author is considerably more problematic than the category of the second self. He believes that the implied author was more than just a paraphrase of the idea behind the second self: it was also a concept with which Booth thought he had arrived at a category standing for the work as a whole. For Killham, a seriously flawed thought process underlies the combination of these two meanings, already questionable in and of themselves, in Booth’s implied author concept. We cannot, he says, both pursue the traces an author has left in his texts and also describe the composition of a ‘whole work’ as proposed by the New Criticism; we must, in short, decide whether we want to interpret literary works in a formalistic or intentionalistic manner:

Booth’s trouble is that this total sense we have of a work we have just finished reading has been most successfully confronted by the New Critics, by whose professional attitude and vocabulary he is repelled. He seeks a term more faithful to the human quality of literature, and jumps at ‘second self’; but this

51 See Killham (1966, 274). Booth (1968, 75–82) gives a detailed response to Killham’s criticism in his essay ‘The Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fiction’.

52 See 1.2.2 above. 53 Killham (1966, 277).


is not a good choice. An author … is in some sense in his work, but he is not the work as a whole. That is something fashioned to an end, but not rhetori-cally as in a speech, or sermon, or essay, but as a fiction, a thing made to re-present actions.54

For Killham, then, the implied author concept expresses Booth’s in-ability to decide between two incompatible positions. Booth, he thinks, was really concerned primarily with the empirical author of literary works but was prevented from pursuing this interest in his study because he was reluctant to depart from certain key principles of the New Criticism, even though, as is clear from The Rhetoric of Fiction, he did not really have any interest in questions of formal analysis.55 Killham describes as follows the unfortunate dilemma in which Booth found himself entangled when developing his ap-proach and its central concept:

Booth is (perhaps unconsciously) seeking the impossible, to reconcile his conception with the central tenet of the New Criticism. For it is clear that what he really seeks to describe by the term is not the reader’s grasp of the meaning, or theme, or significance, or even style of the work, but something quite different, the reader’s idea of what the mind of the author of the work must be like. … What Booth wants to emphasize is really no more than that literary works have authors and do not get written by themselves. But he does not pursue any profitable implications of this remark because he also accepts that the New Criticism denies him the right to argue for a return to biography as criticism.56

In most cases, however, negative reactions to the implied author in the context of interpretation theory go beyond the moderate criti-cism of the kind we find in Killham’s discussion. In the majority of cases, reaction to the concept is characterized by far more funda-mental reservations and objections. The representatives of this type of implied author reception do not, as a rule, provide a substantial analysis of Booth’s remarks on the implied author. Instead, they are primarily concerned with presenting their own approaches to inter-

54 Killham (1966, 288; emphasis in original). 55 The implied author, Killham (1966, 279) writes, ‘leaves one just where one

was before, because everyone can have his own intuitive apprehension of such an artistic whole’ (emphasis in original).

56 Killham (1966, 279–80).


pretation, ones that they think allow the understanding of texts to be described in a manner more theoretically consistent and empirically adequate than is the case in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Thus, most ex-ponents of this kind of response refer to the implied author simply as a point of contrast, something to argue against when presenting their own theories of interpretation.

Probably the most well-known example of this perspective on the implied author is the criticism of the concept put forward by Peter D. Juhl in an essay called ‘Life, Literature, and the Implied Author’ and a book entitled Interpretation.57 Like Killham, Juhl deals with Booth’s concept because he considers it symptomatic of developments taking place in the academic study of literature when it was introduced. Unlike Killham, however, he sees the implied author not as an example of renewed interest in intentionalism but as evidence of the continued influence of the New Criticism. Juhl reads Booth’s concept as a condensed reflection of the New Critics’ belief that literary works are autonomous and thus do not allow us to attribute their explicit and implicit meanings to the empirical writers behind them: ‘the most influential and widely accepted ver-sion of the distinction between man and mask is Wayne Booth’s account of the relation between author and work in terms of the notion of an “implied author”’.58

Juhl believes that Booth’s concept, together with the autonomy thesis he detects behind it, is inadequate for several reasons. Some involve theoretical arguments against the concept, but they are of secondary importance.59 The most important factor in Juhl’s rejec-tion of the concept is his conviction that accepting the implied au-thor leads to a picture of textual interpretation that does not corre-spond to the true state of affairs. In fact, he believes, if we look carefully and objectively at how the interpretation of texts takes

57 See Juhl (1980a; 1980b, 153–95). The essay and monograph chapter are one and the same text.

58 Juhl (1980a, 179). 59 It is sufficient here to note that these theoretical objections rest on the pro-

blematic accusation that the implied author involves a fictional subject (see Juhl 1980a, 183–84).


place in normal circumstances, we arrive at a different conclusion from that of Booth. Juhl demonstrates this by looking at some ex-amples of interpretation in practice, finding that

… by writing a work which expresses or implies certain propositions, the au-thor is asserting those propositions; their expression is real, bona fide expres-sion of belief, not pretence. To put this in another way, the propositions which a work expresses or implies are expressed or implied not by a fictional ‘im-plied author’, but by the real, historical author.60

In Juhl’s view, this had long been overlooked in the debates of in-terpretation theory because the puristic dogmas of the New Criti-cism had made it impossible to assert awareness of the relevance of the empirical author: ‘the implied author doctrine … gives us the il-lusion of having reconciled the author’s presence and the commu-nicative function of literature with a fictional world which satisfies the demand for absolute purity’.61

The criticism advanced in this subgroup of responses to the im-plied author in the context of interpretation theory takes a more radical form in an essay by the Polish literary theorists Artur Blaim and Ludmilla Gruszewska. Their criticism of Booth’s concept is not directed at the form of textual interpretation for which the implied author stands. Instead, they reject the concept because they believe that the whole academic project of interpreting literary texts is questionable in itself. Taking up positions adopted in the empirical study of literature as developed in the Siegen circle around Sieg-fried J. Schmidt in the 1970s and 1980s,62 Blaim and Gruszewska see textual interpretations as acts of processing in which meaning is assigned without methodological explication and without the po-tential of intersubjective verification.63 Taking this perspective, they treat Booth’s implied author concept as a formula employed by

60 Juhl (1980a 196–97). 61 Juhl (1980a, 203). 62 See in general Finke (1982) and Schmidt (1980/82). For a discussion of the

empirical study of literature, see Spree (1995), and Barsch et al. (1994). 63 See Blaim and Gruszewska (1994, 145, 147–48). Classic statements of this

view can be found in Schmidt (1980/82, 324–72; 1983, 250).


critics to make it seem as though their individual interpretations are authorized by the text itself:

Having selected in her/his mind the ‘appropriate set’ of textual elements, rela-tions, semantic principles, etc. the academic critic probably feels that ‘the text proper’—his own subjective construction—is convincing enough to be shared with those who are unable to construct such a proper text. But since it might appear discourteous to tell others ‘I am the truth! Come and listen to my word!’, it is better to say ‘I have found the author and reader who are only implied, and that’s why you’ve missed them. Come and listen to my word’.64

Blaim and Gruszewska do not take this analysis as a basis on which to suggest alternatives to the implied author. Instead, the criticism presented in their essay leads up to the proposal that textual inter-pretation be rejected and the academic study of literature funda-mentally reoriented: Blaim and Gruszewska ‘believe that it is possi-ble to study texts in a rational manner, not their true meanings but the possibilities of meaning-assignation as defined by the semiotic systems functioning in a given culture’.65

2.2 The Implied Author in Relation to Interpretation and Description

2.2.1 Reception of the Concept in the Wake of Structuralism

The nature of the controversies surrounding the implied author con-cept changed fundamentally after 1970. More specifically, the de-bate took on a new shape with the rise of structuralism in the study of literature in Europe and North America during the 1960s, which

64 Blaim and Gruszewska (1994, 148). 65 Blaim and Gruszewska (1994, 155). Both variants of the rejection of interpre-

tation are based on ideas from the empirical study of literature (see, for exam-ple, Schmidt 1983, 251–54).


saw the problems of interpretation give way to a new interest in poetics as the focus of attention.66 This development was reflected most clearly in the way that narrative texts were approached in the academic study of literature. In the preceding decades, the forms and features of narration had been given attention in the study of literature primarily as and when it was convenient to refer to them in the interpretation of texts and the writing of literary history; with the appearance of structuralism, however, there emerged a different approach to the study of narrative. It was concerned not with aiding the interpretation of individual epic texts but with reconstructing basic properties of narrative. This new way of looking at narrative phenomena, generally referred to as ‘narratologie’ since Tzvetan Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron of 1969,67 has been described as follows by Gerald Prince in a survey of the field:

… narratology is not mainly or primarily a handmaiden of interpretation. On the contrary, through its concern for the guiding principles of narrative and through its attempt to characterize not so much the particular meanings of particular narratives but rather what allows narratives to have meanings, nar-ratology has proven to be an important participant in the assault against viewing literary studies as devoted above all to the interpretation of texts.68

Since the 1970s, this picture of the theory of narrative has provided the background for most discussions of how epic texts should be approached and what concepts should be used when doing so.69

Response to The Rhetoric of Fiction is no exception; it has since been defined by the question of whether the central concept of Booth’s study can be built into a poetics of narrative literature, and if so, how—even though Booth repeatedly said that his 1961 mono-graph should not to be understood as a contribution to narratology

66 On structuralism, see Scholes (1974) and Dosse (1991). 67 Todorov (1969, 10). On the various programmes and terminologies that have

emerged from the study of narrative, see Cornils and Schernus (2003). 68 Prince (1995a, 129–30). See also Prince (1990, 1995b). 69 For a survey of the vast recent literature on the renewal and reconceptualiza-

tion of narratology, see Tolliver (1997), Herman (1999), Fludernik (2000), Nünning and Nünning (2002a; 2002b), and Meister et al. (2005).


in the structuralist sense and that his implied author should not be seen as a narratological concept.70

The question, then, is whether Booth’s rhetorical programme is compatible with the narratological enterprise. The opinions ex-pressed about the implied author in relation to this question differ markedly from one another in detail. Even so, two basic subgroups of implied author reception can be distinguished on the basis of the concept of narrative theory behind them and the position they take regarding the relationship between narratology and textual inter-pretation. The first subgroup comprises responses to the implied author in relation to how interpretation takes place in practice, the second responses in relation to textual description.

2.2.2 The Implied Author in the Context of Interpretation in Practice

The Contextual Background

Most responses elicited by the implied author from the time of structuralism onwards are to be found when the concept is referred to in the context of discussion about how interpretation takes place in practice.71 This branch of reception includes the developments that have seen use of Booth’s concept become widespread not only in literary studies but also in cultural studies in general; since the 1970s, the issues at stake here have shaped the treatment of the im-

70 See, in general, Booth (1983b) and, in particular, Booth (1983a, 404), in which Booth writes that The Rhetoric of Fiction ‘does not provide a complete “theory of fiction”, or a “structuralist typology of narrative possibilities”, or a developed doctrine of “textuality”, let alone of “intertextuality”. … It is not a systematic science of anything, not even of “narratology”.’

71 Strictly speaking, this type of reception also contains the various alternative and competing concepts to which Booth’s implied author has given rise (see 2.3 below).


plied author in the dictionaries, introductory texts, and handbooks of various text-based disciplines.72

When the implied author is discussed with respect to interpreta-tion in practice, it is considered in the context of how texts are un-derstood but is not, however, seen and evaluated as part of a par-ticular approach to interpretation. The key idea behind this strand of the discussion is the assumption that it is impossible to obtain an adequate impression of how texts are read and understood without bringing the implied author into play. Thus, almost without excep-tion, work belonging to this type of implied author reception does not attempt to discuss or evaluate the concept by comparing it with competing theories about what literary texts mean and how they are understood. Instead, most appraisals of the implied author in this context do no more than discuss the specific functions it has in the interpretive process.

In describing the situation like this, of course, we must remember that our picture does not necessarily match the way in which those who discuss the implied author in relation to interpretation in prac-tice see themselves. They do not see their work on Booth’s concept as contributing to the theory of textual interpretation; instead, they believe that their studies are part of poetics or literary theory be-cause they are concerned not with reconstructing the meaning or aesthetic value of particular texts but with investigating the basic building-blocks of literature.73 A concise statement of this self-image can be found in the introduction to Story and Discourse, first published in 1978,74 by Seymour Chatman, probably the most well-

72 See, for examples, textbooks on the analysis of narrative texts, dramas, or lyric poetry such as Kahrmann et al. (1977), Pfister (1977), Ludwig (1982), Burdorf (1997), or Wenzel (2004); introductions to literary studies and inter-pretation theory such as Weimar (1980), Brackert and Stückrath (1981), Schutte (1984), or Klausnitzer (2004); and dictionaries of narratology and lit-erary and cultural theory such as Prince (1987), Nünning (2001b, 2001c, 2005b), or Herman et al. (2005).

73 On this, see Hrushovsky (1976). 74 Chatman (1978). Much of the monograph is based on various essays that

Chatman had published on aspects of narrative since the 1960s, most notably Chatman (1969, 1971, 1975).


known figure to engage in this form of implied author reception. He writes that

Literary theory is the study of the nature of literature. It is not concerned with the evaluation or description of any particular literary work for its own sake. It is not literary criticism but the study of the givens of criticism, the nature of literary objects and their parts.75

Accordingly, regarding narratology as a component of literary the-ory, Chatman goes on to say that

Narrative theory has no critical axe to grind. Its objective is a grid of possibili-ties, through the establishment of the minimal narrative constitutive features. It plots individual texts on the grid and asks whether their accommodation re-quires adjustments of the grid.76

Despite seeing their position in such a way, representatives of this type of implied author reception still try to determine the concept’s role from interpretive processes. The reason for this lies in their dis-satisfaction with the concept of the text in terms of which struc-turalist literary theory operates. Reception of the implied author with respect to interpretation in practice is based on the assumption that a poetics can describe its object of study properly only by ap-proaching it as a phenomenon of communication rather than one of structure. Thus, work belonging to this strand of reception advo-cates a literary theory, and thus a narratology, that not only com-prises structuralist positions but also draws on the various ways of modelling reading processes put forward by Hans Robert Jauß, Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco, and many others during the 1960s and 1970s.77 In her 1983 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics,Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan writes in this spirit that

75 Chatman (1978, 18; emphasis in original). 76 Chatman (1978, 19). See also the reflection on the theoretical status of narra-

tology in Chatman (1990a, 1990b), and, especially, Chatman’s committed re-sponse to Jonathan Culler’s criticism of structuralist narrative theory, which he meets by arguing that we should not ‘reintroduce interpretation into nar-ratology and thus into poetics in general’ (Chatman 1988, 15).

77 See 2.3 below.


whereas the Anglo-American New Critics and the French Structuralists treated the text as a more or less autonomous object, the new orientation stres-ses the reciprocal relations between text and reader … . Just as the reader par-ticipates in the production of the text’s meaning so the text shapes the reader.78

Simplifying somewhat, then, responses to the implied author with respect to interpretation in practice should be seen against the back-ground of a more general issue in theoretical discourse: an attempt to extend the structuralist project of literary and narrative theory in the direction of reception theory.79 This programmatic objective explains why this branch of the discussion does not distinguish be-tween the reception and critical interpretation of literary works. Representatives of this type of reception always seek to determine the usefulness of Booth’s concept in the context of studies that are concerned with reconstructing ideal typical reading processes and modelling a set of tools with which to analyse texts.80 One conse-quence of this aspect of reception of the implied author in relation to interpretation in practice is that no real attempt is made to come to terms with the epistemic status of the implied author category. This has many kinds of far-reaching consequences when it comes to functionalizing the concept: although representatives of this branch of the discussion do not, as a rule, consider it sensible to distinguish between descriptive and interpretive ways of referring to literary works, they are convinced that the implied author presents an ideal way of mediating between simple textual observations and more complex operations of understanding.81 David Darby has summed

78 Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 117). 79 See also the remarks in Darby (2001, 833–35). Darby sees this as marking

the beginning of a tendency, apparent since the mid-1980s, that has produced several attempts to reconceptualize the study of narrative in contextualist terms. On Darby’s ideas, see Kindt and Müller (2003c).

80 On the difference between epistemological and technical concepts of inter-pretation, see Spree (1995), Winko (1995), and Carlshamre and Pettersson (2003).

81 See Kindt and Müller (2003c, 414–17) and Darby (2003, 427–29). Examples of suggestions on how to distinguish description from interpretation can be


up this view in an article published in Poetics Today in 2001: ‘My proposition is that this implied intelligence occupies precisely the point in the process of narrative communication that admits an in-teraction between contextual consideration and formalist analy-sis.’82 Most representatives of this type of implied author reception, in other words, understand the implied author as a form of interpre-tation that is set apart from others by the fact that it emerges natu-rally, so to speak, out of textual description.83 Their position is one in which the concept is seen to have both the intersubjective validity associated with description and the ability to provide coherent ex-planations associated with interpretation. Taken further, it is not uncommon for this position to lead to the thesis that the implied author can serve as a basis for evaluating differing understandings of a text.84

Suggested Explications in Relation to Interpretation in Practice

The implied author has met with almost unanimous approval in the context of work relating to interpretation in practice. As indicated above, Booth’s concept has been positively received here because almost all work representing this type of reception assumes that the process of literary communication be properly described only if the implied author is brought into play. Sometimes, this view is an ex-pression of the more radical thesis that employing the concept is a

found in Margolis (1968, 1989), Reichert (1968/69), Matthews (1977), No-vitz (1982), Goldman (1990), Jahraus (1994), and Kindt and Müller (2003d).

82 Darby (2001, 838). See also Darby (2003, 428): ‘the theorization of implied authorship has historically been coincident with—and has substantially facili-tated—the coming together of formalist and contextualist concerns in narra-tology’.

83 See, for example, Darby (2001, 838–39) or Abbott (2002, 77, 95). For discus-sion of this understanding of the implied author, see Kindt and Müller (1999, 285–87; 2003c, 417–19).

84 See 2.3.2 below.


basic condition of possibility for understanding texts in the first place. As Richard S. Briggs, for example, explains in an essay on the implied author of the Old Testament: ‘Put simply, the implied author of any text is the author the text requires—the author we must imagine in order to make sense of what we read.’85 In most cases, of course, discussion of the implied author with respect to interpretation in practice does not attach such fundamental signifi-cance to Booth’s concept in the understanding of texts. Instead, taking The Rhetoric of Fiction as their starting point, most repre-sentatives of this type of reception assume that it is not possible to provide an informative reconstruction of the structure of literary communication in its entirety without referring to the implied au-thor. In this respect, too, Chatman is a typical exponent of implied author reception in terms of interpretation in practice. In his book Coming to Terms, he writes: ‘I believe that narratology—and text theory generally—needs the implied author (and its counterpart, the implied reader) to account for features that would otherwise remain unexplained’.86 Most writers who comment on the implied author in the context of interpretation in practice believe that use of the concept can be justified primarily on the basis of two aspects of lit-erary communication processes, both of which are particularly im-portant when the content of a text is being reconstructed.

First, representatives of this type of reception believe it is sensi-ble to introduce the implied author because they share Dieter Ja-nik’s understanding of literary texts as ‘communicated communica-tion’,87 they believe, in other words, that the ideology of a work does not necessarily have to be equivalent to the beliefs of its nar-rator or one of its characters. Wilhelmus J. M. Bronzwaer, for ex-ample, expresses this idea when he writes that ‘we need an instance that calls the extradiegetic narrator into existence, which is respon-sible for him in the same way as he is responsible for the diegesis,

85 Briggs (2002, 264). 86 Chatman (1990a, 74). 87 Janik (1973, 12). ‘Kommunizierte Kommunikation’ (my translation). Gérard

Genette has developed a corresponding position on the basis of John Searle’s thought (see Genette 1990).


and which provides us with the metalingual code in which we can discuss him’.88 Representatives of this type of implied author recep-tion justify such views by pointing to a feature of epic communi-cation that has, since Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction, been known as unreliable narration. It occurs when the narratorial entity is morally non-exemplary (normative) or presents the story in a misleading way (factual unreliability).89 Such narratives are therefore paradig-matic examples of why it can be necessary, as Abbott says, ‘to go beyond the sensibility of the narrator for a just account of the novel’s import’.90 Taking up Booth’s ideas on narratorial unreliabil-ity, the exponents of reception of the implied author in terms of in-terpretation in practice identify this ‘beyond’ with the implied au-thor;91 they see the concept as a ‘presupposition of unreliability’,92

as a frame of reference for assessing the credibility of a narratorial entity.93

88 Bronzwaer (1978, 3). 89 On this distinction, see Olson (2003), Kindt (2005), and Nünning (2005c). 90 Abbott (2002, 77). 91 Booth’s well-known definition of the unreliable narrator in The Rhetoric of

Fiction runs as follows: ‘For a lack of better terms, I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not’ (Booth 1961, 158–59; italics in original).

92 Currie (1995, 27). This view can also be found in, for example, Yacobi (1981, 1987, 2001, 2005), Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Chatman (1978, 1990a), Hof (1980, 1984), Sparshott (1986), Prince (1987), DeReuck (1990a, 1990b), Diengott (1990, 1995), Phelan (1989, 1996, 2005), Müller (1991a), Wall (1994), Baah (1999), Phelan and Martin (1999), Olson (2003), Currie (2004b), and Nünning (2005a).

93 Only relatively recently has there been an attempt to conceptualize the phe-nomenon of narratorial unreliability without making recourse to the implied author concept. See, for example, Nünning (1993, 1998a, 1998b, 1999a, 1999b), and also Allrath (1998), Busch (1998), Jahn (1998), and Zerweck (2001). All these proposals are based on the following idea: ‘Whether a nar-rator is classified as credible … depends not on the distance between his norms and values and those of the implied author but on the extent to which the narrator’s world-view fits in with the recipient’s model of reality.’ (‘Ob ein Erzähler als unglaubwürdig eingestuft wird oder nicht, hängt … nicht von der Distanz zwischen seinen Werten und Normen und denen des implied au-


Representatives of reception of the implied author in relation to interpretation in practice also find it advisable to adopt the concept because they believe that the moral values ascribed to a work can-not be taken as a direct pointer to the ideology of its author. Chat-man formulates the position as follows: ‘Positing an implied author inhibits the over-hasty assumption that the reader has direct access through the fictional text to the real author’s intentions and ideol-ogy.’94

In accepting the implied author, as a rule, discussions of the con-cept in relation to interpretation in practice do more than simply paraphrase Booth’s treatment of it in a more or less sophisticated manner. Even if the supporters of this type of reception hope, as Chatman would say, to defend the concept,95 they believe that the way in which it is introduced and used in The Rhetoric of Fiction is problematic for a number of reasons. Their criticism is directed pri-marily at the following two aspects of Booth’s treatment of the im-plied author: (1) the way in which he handles the definition of the concept and (2) the way in which he characterizes its role in literary communication.

(1) Those who respond to the implied author in relation to inter-pretation in practice are agreed that The Rhetoric of Fiction does not provide a convincing definition of the concept and that Booth’s scattered remarks on its explication are not sufficient to make up for this deficit. As early as 1974, Joseph Ewen wrote that ‘the term re-quires a more precise definition’.96 Different as they may be, the

thor ab, sondern davon, inwiefern die Weltsicht des Erzählers mit dem Wirk-lichkeitsmodell des Rezipienten zu vereinbaren ist’; Nünning 1998b, 25; my translation). Another alternative to Booth’s understanding of the phenomenon is developed in Martinez and Scheffel (1999), Cohn (2000), and Kindt (2004, 2005).

94 Chatman (1990a, 76). 95 See the chapter ‘In Defense of the Implied Author’ in Chatman (1990a, 74–

89). 96 Ewen (1974, ix). Despite this observation, Ewen’s remarks on explicating the

concept turn out to be of little help in clarifying it. He writes that ‘the implied author is, in truth, a construction in the mind of the reader’, then says that ‘the biographical author creates the implied author’, before finally asserting


attempts to arrive at a clearer, more precise definition can be di-vided into two classes.

Some participants in the debate surrounding the implied author’s role in interpretation in practice suggest that the implied author of a work should be identified with the central norms of that work. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is probably the most prominent figure to advocate such an understanding of Booth’s ideas about the key term of The Rhetoric of Fiction. Her view can be seen taking shape in her well-known 1976 discussion of Gérard Genette’s Figures III, in which she writes that ‘without the implied author it is difficult to analyse the “norms” of the text’.97 In her Narrative Fiction of 1983, she then proposes that ‘the notion of the implied author … is best considered as a set of “implicit norms”’.98 A more specific under-standing of Booth’s concept along these lines has found some re-cognition in the debate on narratorial unreliability, but the sugges-tion that the implied author be defined using the set of norms of a text has otherwise failed to meet with much approval. One reason for this may be the fact that the idea of explicating the concept in such a way has yet to be elaborated in detail; hardly ever in the search for an adequate definition of the concept has it actually been explained what we mean by the norms and values of a text and how we might go about identifying them.99 The crucial factor behind the limited success of the approach in question, however, is more likely to be the fact that it picks out one of the many definitions of the implied author and thereby deprives the concept of its ambiguity, the very characteristic that makes it so attractive in the first place to many of those who work on it in this context.

that ‘the implied author … is constructed by the entirety of the work’ (Ewen 1974, ix).

97 Rimmon (1976, 58). 98 Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 88). The concept is explained in a similar manner by

various representatives of reception in the context of textual description (see, for example, Bal 1981a, 42; 1985, 119, or Diengott 1993a, 181; 1993b, 73). See 2.2.3 below.

99 Yacobi (1987) points towards some possibilities for clarifying these issues.


Indeed, it is for this very reason that most work on the implied author in the context of interpretation in practice does not attempt to clarify its definition by isolating a single aspect of its use. The aim is instead to arrive at an explication of the concept in which the en-tire spectrum of its meanings is preserved. There are a number of passages in The Rhetoric of Fiction in which Booth gives what we might call a synopsis of his various characterizations of the implied author.100 Drawing on them, most of those who discuss the concept in relation to interpretation in practice suggest that the implied au-thor be defined as the totality of the elements in a text and the strat-egy behind their selection and arrangement. The normative moral order of a work thus becomes only one of several aspects that must be considered when determining the implied author. This explica-tion of Booth’s category, then, proposes that it should be understood as an entity to which the underlying conception of a text can be at-tributed, as a ‘sensibility behind the narrative that accounts for how it is constructed’.101 This kind of understanding of the concept is at work when Chatman suggests the following definition: ‘The source of a … text’s whole structure of meaning—not only of assertion and denotation but also of its implication, connotation, and ideological nexus—is the implied author.’102 Comparable attempts to explicate the implied author are hardly uncommon in reception of the concept in terms of interpretation in practice, but they do little to help clarify it. By retaining the various facets of the concept’s meaning, the for-mulations that have been put forward to date preserve the very in-consistencies that marked Booth’s remarks on the implied author in the first place. In many cases, those who follow this approach to ex-plicating the concept understand it as a syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic concept all at once; they define the implied author as a

100 See, for example, Booth (1961, 73–74): ‘Our sense of the implied author in-cludes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of the completed artistic whole’.

101 Abbott (2002, 77). On such a view, see also Ewen (1974), Schwarz (1985), Reid (1986), Chatman (1978, 1990a), Nelles (1993), and Schönert (1999).

102 Chatman (1990a, 75).


structure of the text, as a strategy behind the structure of the text, and as a participant in communication responsible for that strategy. In Coming to Terms, for example, Chatman presents Booth’s con-cept first as ‘the text itself’, then as a ‘textual intention’, and then as the ‘agency within the narrative fiction which guides any reading of it’.103 It is quite obvious that explications of this kind fail to remedy the imprecision of the concept, and thus not surprising that they hardly ever go into further detail about how the implied author of a literary text can be reconstructed.

(2) For those recipients concerned with interpretation in practice, it is not just the definition of the implied author but also its place in literary communication that is in need of explication. Representa-tives of this type of reception note with approval that, by introduc-ing the concept, Booth prepared the way for the idea that literary works be seen in terms of communication theory. At the same time, however, they believe that Booth’s own treatment of the novels he looks at does not really live up to the programme of textual analysis he set in motion. There is a consensus in reception of the implied author in relation to interpretation in practice that Booth’s analyses did not give sufficient consideration to the relevance of the reader, and thus operated with an insufficiently complex picture of the meaning and interpretation of literary works.104 This belief has

103 Chatman (1990a, 74, 81, 104). The comments of Nilli Diengott and Ansgar Nünning on Chatman’s attempts to explicate the concept apply also to most other similar attempts at clarification. Diengott (1993b, 70) writes that ‘Chat-man … tries to defend implied author by clarifying the term. However, his discussion seems to muddy the waters even more’, and Nünning (1993, 2) observes that ‘however, a not inconsiderable number of people will feel more convinced in their scepticism towards the implied author when confronted with the terminological, methodological, and pragmatic arguments that Chat-man advances in support of the concept’ (‘hingegen werden sich nicht weni-ge von den terminologischen, methodischen und pragmatischen Argumenten, die Chatman für den implied author ins Feld führt, in ihrer Skepsis gegenüber dem Konzept bestärkt fühlen’; my translation).

104 See, for example, Martin (1986, 153): ‘Booth and others use a linear com-munication model to explain fiction. … But by including the reader as an es-sential feature of the narrative situation, and by fixing the concept of literary


prompted a series of attempts to describe literary communication and the significance of the implied author in it with greater preci-sion than is the case in The Rhetoric of Fiction.105 Two standpoints can be distinguished here.

One group involved in discussing the concept in terms of inter-pretation in practice seeks to take Booth’s ideas further by model-ling literary works and their reception as communication processes with multiple levels of sender and receiver.106 The models that have been put forward, most of which are based on narrative texts, often differ markedly from one another in certain aspects of their configu-ration. They vary, for example, with respect to the levels of com-munication they postulate, whether these levels of communication are obligatory or optional, how the relationship between the levels and participants is treated, and whether they are intended to handle fictional texts alone or factual ones as well. The model of commu-nication employed by Chatman in Story and Discourse is a more or less straightforward suggestion (see figure 3).

Fig. 3. Chatman’s model of narrative communication107

meaning between narrator and reader, this model suggests new ways of what happens when we read’ (emphasis in original).

105 Booth himself agreed that such explication was necessary when he looked back on the positions he had adopted in the early 1960s (see Booth 1983a, 428–30).

106 See Petersen (1980) on the establishment of such models in the study of nar-rative.

107 Chatman (1978, 151). Explaining the diagram, Chatman says here: ‘The box indicates that only the implied author and implied reader are immanent to a narrative. The narrator and narratee are optional (parentheses). The real au-thor and real reader are outside the narrative transaction as such, though, of course, indispensable to it in an ultimate practical sense.’


Considerably more levels, and thus considerably more participants in the mediation process, on the other hand, are present in the model of epic communication introduced by Wallace Martin in his 1986 book Recent Theories of Narrative (see figure 4).

Fig. 4. Martin’s model of narrative communication108

The numerous models of communication that have been discussed in the study of literature since the 1970s may differ markedly from one another at times,109 but they all have in common an understand-ing of the implied author as the crucial text-internal speaker whose statements are directed at an implied reader.110 Supporters of the traditional models of communication, in other words, see the im-plied author as what brings forth a text; for them, Booth’s concept stands for the ‘voice’ that gives expression to a work and is there-fore hierarchically superior to all the other speakers in a text. A paradigmatic statement of such an approach to the implied author

108 Martin (1986, 154). 109 See, for example, the various communication models in Bartoszy ski (1973,

202–24), Fieguth (1973, 186–201), Link (1976, 19–23), Kahrmann et al. (1977, 44–46), Pfister (1977, 20–21), Bronzwaer (1978, 10), Lanser (1981, 143–45), Schutte (1984, 131), Branigan (1992, 87), or Schlickers (1997, 68–73). See also 2.3 below.

110 For the sake of simplicity, we shall not discuss the various names that have been used to refer to the hierarchically topmost text-internal senders and re-ceivers.


can be found in Bronzwaer’s discussion of Mieke Bal’s concept of focalization. He describes Booth’s concept as an ‘instance with lin-guistic powers’,111 and says of the process of literary communica-tion that ‘the relation between narrator and character … is matched by a similar relation between the implied author and the narrator’.112

Attempts to treat texts as communication processes in the way described above have met with numerous fundamental objections in the academic study of literature in the past few decades. Most of this criticism has been directed at the use of the categories of the implied author and the implied reader.113 The established communi-cation models are also being treated with increasing caution when Booth’s concept is discussed in relation to interpretation in practice. As one would expect, criticism in this particular context is directed not at the models as a whole or the fact that the implied author fea-tures in them per se, but rather at the specific role they give the con-cept in literary communication. Critics here believe that we fall foul of an ‘anthropomorphic trap’ if we treat the implied author as a

111 Bronzwaer (1981, 194). On Bronzwaer’s essay, see also Bal (1981a, 1981b). 112 Bronzwaer (1981, 200). Comparable positions are adopted by Füger (1974),

Bronzwaer (1978), Knight (1979), Lanser (1981), Martin (1986), York (1987), Wallace (1988), and Currie (1993). A series of remarks by Booth himself suggests that the implied author should be understood in this way (see Booth 1952, 164; 1961, 71–74).

113 See, for example, Hempfer (1977, 10): ‘The models whose construction is based on communication theory contain … a number of problematic enti-ties—the implied author or the implied reader, for example—that it is better to do without. Not only would they appear to be of no theoretical use; they also confuse what is really the fundamental distinction, that between text-in-ternal and text-external communication situations.’ (‘Die auf kommunika-tionstheoretischer Grundlage konstruierten Modelle enthalten … einige prob-lematische Entitäten wie etwa den impliziten Autor oder den impliziten Le-ser, auf die man besser verzichtet. Sie scheinen nicht nur theoretisch unnütz, sie vermischen auch die eigentlich fundamentale Unterscheidung, nämlich der von textinterner und textexterner Sprechsituation’; my translation). For criticism of the communication model approach, see also Nünning (1993, 8–9; 2001a, 373), Jahn and Nünning (1994, 285), and Jahn (1995, 45). For a different view, though, see Nünning (1989, 22–40).


sender in the communication process,114 and they urge on this basis that ‘the notion of the implied author must be de-personified’.115

The implied author, they believe, does not have a ‘voice’ in the nar-ratological sense of the word, and must thus be categorially distin-guished from the various speakers who appear in literary works. As Chatman, for example, puts it: ‘Unlike the narrator, the implied au-thor can tell us nothing. He, or better, it has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn.’116 For this reason, a growing number of those working on the concept in relation to interpretation in practice are convinced that the implied author should be understood not as a pragmatic participant in communication but rather as a semantic concept. It is, they believe, a construct that readers create in the course of receiv-ing a text. Rimmon-Kenan draws the following conclusion in her consideration of Booth’s concept:

… the implied author must be seen as a construct inferred and assembled by the reader from all the components of the text. Indeed, speaking of the implied author as a construct based on the text seems to me far safer than imagining it as a personified ‘consciousness’ or ‘second self’. … The implied author cannot literally be a participant in the narrative com-munication situation.117

The sharpest formulation of this approach to explicating the concept is probably that of Michael J. Toolan in his Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction: ‘The implied author is a real position in

114 Chatman (1990a, 88). 115 Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 88). 116 Chatman (1978, 148; emphasis in original). On this, see also Rimmon-Kenan

(1983, 87), Chatman (1990a, 85), Nelles (1993, 22–24), Aczel 1998, 473–77), Schönert (1999, 293), Hühn and Schönert (2002, 296–97), Larsson (2002, part 4); Margolin (2003, 276–77) or Schönert (2004, 307–08).

117 Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 87–88). This view is already apparent when Rimmon-Kenan treats the implied author as a ‘mental construct based on the text as a whole’ in her 1976 review of Genette’s Figures III (Rimmon 1976, 58).


narrative processing, a receptor’s construct, but it is not a real rolein narrative transmission.’118

The idea that the implied author should be treated as an inference of the recipient rather than a participant in communication has since found widespread agreement in discussion of the concept in relation to interpretation in practice. However, the representatives of this type of reception are still far from reaching a consensus about the exact nature of these deductions made by recipients about the writ-ers of texts. The majority of those who take such an approach be-lieve that constructing a text’s implied author means making an in-ference based solely on the particular work in question and its pro-perties. Fotis Jannidis, for example, expresses this view when he suggests defining the implied author as ‘the construct the reader makes of an author, of, that is, his intention, his properties, and so on, on the basis of a particular text’.119 To support this definition, he writes that

in this way, we are able to make a most convenient terminological distinction between author-constructs formed on the basis of biographical sources (epis-tolary exchanges, information about individual encounters, and so on), those formed on the basis of multiple texts—constructs, we might say, of the oeuvre

118 Toolan (1988, 78; emphasis in original). On this position, see also Jannidis (2004, 15–83; 2002, 546–47): ‘The participants in narrative communication, for example the “implied author” or the “narrator”, are not entities that share in the reality of the fictional communication … . They are rather concepts with which readers associate the information in a text in order to process that information.’ (‘Die Instanzen der narrativen Kommunikation, z.B. “impliziter Autor” oder “Erzähler”, sind keine Entitäten die an der Realität der fiktion-alen Kommunikation beteiligt sind … . Es sind vielmehr Konzepte des Le-sers, mit denen er Informationen aus dem Text durch Zuschreibung verar-beitet’; my translation).

119 Jannidis (2002, 548; emphasis in original). ‘Das Konstrukt eines Autors durch den Leser, d.h. seiner Intention, seiner Merkmale, usw., aufgrund eines bestimmten Textes’ (my translation). On this view, see also Ewen (1974), Kummer (1976), Kummer and Schmitz (1976), Rimmon (1976), Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Chatman (1978), Chatman (1990a), or Nelles (1993).


author or ‘career author’ (Booth)—and those formed on the basis of only a single text.120

Alongside this kind of position, which is closely related to Booth’s own stance, another view has been gaining ground for some time in reception of the implied author in relation to interpretation in prac-tice. Advocates of this alternative view believe that inferences about the author of a work are made by drawing on more sources of in-formation than we would think from the assumption that authors are constructed on a purely textual basis. When recipients identify the implied author of a text, the argument goes, they always refer, ex-plicitly or implicitly, to a variety of contexts, for example to lin-guistic and cultural knowledge of the time in which the work in question was composed.121 Darby, for example, writes in the essay on the history of narrative theory cited above that ‘an implied au-thor … is itself the product of negotiations between intratextual and extratextual realms’.122

Most recently, Sandra Heinen has gone a step further in distanc-ing herself from the idea that the implied author should be under-stood as the result of an inference made on the basis of a particular text alone. In an essay published in the journal Sprachkunst in 2002, she sets out a proposal according to which the implied author should be understood as the image readers obtain of an author when they read one or more of his texts, considering all the information

120 Jannidis (2002, 548). ‘Auf diese Weise kann man terminologisch recht ein-fach zwischen Autorkonstrukten aufgrund von biographischen Quellen (Briefwechseln, Zeugnissen über bestimmte Begegnungen etc.), von mehre-ren Texten—sozusagen der Werkautor oder “career author” (Booth)—oder eben aufgrund von einem Text unterscheiden’ (my translation). On the vari-ous kinds and functions of author-constructs, see also Jannidis (1999).

121 See, for example, Chatman (1990a, 78) or Currie (1990, 81). A correspond-ing perspective underlies most of the concepts that have been put forward as alternatives to that of the implied author (see 2.3 below).

122 Darby (2001, 839). On this position, see also Schwarz (1985, 484) or Wieg-mann (1981, 40). Darby (2003, 427) has recently explained this understand-ing of the implied author again, remarkably referring to Rimmon-Kenan’s suggestions for explicating the concept in the process.


available to them about him in the process. Heinen describes the formation of such an image as follows:

We can conceive of the construction of an author-image as a parallel to the process of constructing characters. The reader usually has a certain amount of prior knowledge about an author, as a rule knowing at least his name, his gen-der, and often the dates of his life as well. The publisher, the cover of a book, a foreword, or the title of a work also contain information that can be related to the author … . In addition, the style, thematic concerns, and implicit or ex-plicit values of the text impart an impression of its author. Common clichés about writers … must also have a role in the process of author construction that should not be overlooked. All these pieces of information, textual, para-textual, and contextual in origin, allow an image of the author to take shape in the reader’s mind. Every additional source of information in the form of fur-ther literary works or non-fictional particulars about the author is worked into this image; if it cannot be integrated into the image, the image must be funda-mentally updated accordingly.123

As we have seen, discussion of the implied author in relation to in-terpretation in practice has produced a wide variety of suggestions as far as detailed elucidation of the category is concerned. Repre-sentatives of this type of reception are, however, generally agreed that the terms Booth suggested be used when referring to the con-cept—the ‘implied author’ or the author’s ‘second self’—were not particularly well-chosen. Thus, moves to elucidate the concept in

123 Heinen (2002, 337). ‘Die Konstruktion eines Autorbildes kann man sich pa-rallel zum Prozeß der Figurenkonstruktion vorstellen. Der Leser hat meist ein gewisses Vorwissen über den Autor, kennt in der Regel zumindest seinen Na-men, sein Geschlecht und häufig auch seine Lebensdaten. Auch der Verlag, das Cover eines Buches, ein Vorwort oder der Titel eines Werkes enthalten Informationen, die auf den Autor bezogen werden können … . Darüber hin-aus vermittelt der Text durch seinen Stil, die Thematik und implizite oder ex-plizite Wertungen einem Eindruck vom Autor. Auch allgemeine Klischees von Schriftstellern … spielen sicher im Prozeß der Autorkonstruktion eine nicht zu vernachlässigende Rolle. Aus all diesen Informationen textuellen, paratextuellen und kontextuellen Ursprungs kann in der Vorstellung des Le-sers ein Bild des Autors entstehen. Jede zusätzliche Information in Form wei-terer literarischer Werke oder nichtfiktionaler Auskünfte über den Autor wird in dieses Bild integriert; gelingt dies nicht, muß es zu einer grundlegenden Revision des Bildes kommen’ (my translation). On the idea and construction of author-images, see also Heinen (2006, 41–48).


the context of interpretation in practice usually conclude with the terminological proposal that it would be better to speak of an in-ferred author rather than an implied author.124 This suggestion has recently been repeated by H. Porter Abbott in his Cambridge Intro-duction to Narrative: ‘We … as we read, develop our own idea of this implied sensibility behind the narrative. So the implied author … could as easily be called “the inferred author” and perhaps with more justice’.125

The various names for the implied author that crop up in Chat-man’s Coming to Terms give a better impression of the imprecision that Booth’s concept retains in many of the explications outlined in the context of interpretation in practice. Chatman too begins by not-ing that ‘we might better speak of the “inferred” than of the “im-plied” author’;126 at the end of his treatment of Booth’s concept, he then lists a series of alternative terms, from which it is clear that he does not have a clear picture of how it should be understood: ‘for readers who feel uncomfortable about using the term “implied au-thor” to refer to this concept, I am perfectly willing to substitute the phrase “text implication” or “text instance” or “text design” or even simply “text intent”’.127

2.2.3 The Implied Author in Relation to Description

The Contextual Background

In most cases, as we have seen, Booth’s concept is ultimately de-fended by those who respond to it in the context of interpretation in practice. This was not, however, the only branch of reception that

124 Compare Booth (1961, 74–75). 125 Abbott (2002, 77). On this suggestion, see also, for example, Rimmon-Kenan

(1983, 87) or Toolan (1988, 78), and also Genette (1988, 150). 126 Chatman (1990a, 77). 127 Chatman (1990a, 86).


took shape when narrative theory rose to prominence on the back of the structuralist movement. Another central branch of implied au-thor reception developed in the narratology of the 1970s and 1980s, one that consists of responses to the concept in the context of dis-cussion about concepts and models for describing texts.

Examples of this type of reception resemble work on the implied author in relation to interpretation in practice in that they are not concerned, or not primarily concerned, with evaluating existing theories of interpretation or developing ones of their own. Members of both groups aim to draw up a structuralist poetics on the basis of narrative texts and thus confine themselves almost exclusively to discussing whether there is a place for Booth’s concept in a theory of literature and, above all, in a theory of the epic. Only in a few cases do we find discussion of such issues accompanied by the at-tempt to look at the implied author concept in more detail.128 The crucial difference between implied author reception in relation to description on the one hand and in relation to interpretation in prac-tice on the other lies in the concept of narratology underlying the two perspectives. More precisely, the exponents of the two types of reception differ above all in the position they adopt regarding the role that literary and narrative theory should play when it comes to textual interpretation. 129

Those who respond to the implied author in relation to interpre-tation in practice, as we have seen, strongly resist the idea that nar-ratology is an auxiliary discipline that assists us in interpreting texts. At the same time, though, their work suggests that the re-sources of narrative theory can be used to represent and thus inform the reading process. Responses to the implied author in the context of description do not see narratology as a theory of interpretation either; however, they are based on the conviction that narratology

128 Examples of such a treatment of Booth’s concept in two stages can be found in Genette (1988) and Diengott (1993a) (see 2.2.3 below).

129 See Kindt and Müller (2003b, 206–09) on various types of standpoint on this question.


should be treated as a set of tools for describing texts.130 In this con-text, description is taken to mean an approach to literature that is concerned not with the overall meaning of individual texts but with identifying their underlying structures.131

The prefaces and afterwords of Gérard Genette’s studies Narra-tive Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited give probably the most well-known outline of the programme against the background of which description-related responses to the implied author should be seen. In the Discourse,132 Genette writes that the narratological toolset he develops in his study of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past should be understood as ‘a method of analysis’.133 In no way, he says, is it meant as ‘an instrument of incarceration, of bringing to heel, or of pruning that in fact castrates’; instead, he hopes he has provided ‘a procedure of discovery, and a way of describing’.134

130 When we speak of description in the present context, we are in all cases re-ferring to the particular narratological programme outlined here. This does not change the fact that description also has an important role in other lines of narratology—see, for example, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s remarks on struc-turalism and the direction taken in her own studies of the 1980s: ‘Of the various branches of literary study, description seemed the one closest to the status of science, and indeed a description of the ways in which literature op-erates was conceived of as the goal of literary theory’ (Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 136–37).

131 See Strube (2003) on various types of meaning in literary texts; see Danne-berg (1996) and Kindt and Müller (2003d) on the concept of description in disciplines based on textual interpretation

132 Genette (1980); the original French version is entitled ‘Discours du récit: essai de méthode’ (Genette 1972).

133 Genette (1980, 23). ‘Une méthode d’analyse’ (Genette 1972, 68). As shown by, for example, the work of Eberhard Lämmert and Franz Stanzel in the 1950s, a corresponding understanding of narratology lay behind the German-language study of narrative from an early date (see, for example, Lämmert 1955, 17–18; Stanzel 1959, 127–28; 1964, 9–10; Stanzel 1979, 300; Petersen 1977, 167–71; 1993, 1–4). Only in the recent past have efforts been made to explicate this idea, for example in Stanzel (2002b), on which see Kindt (2003).

134 Genette (1980, 265). ‘Un instrument d’incarcération, d’émondage castrateur ou de mise au pas’; ‘une procédure de découverte, et un moyen de descrip-tion’ (Genette 1972, 271).


Genette picks up this theme again in the afterword to NarrativeDiscourse Revisited,135 where he stresses again that he has no time for the ‘impositions of “coherence”’ that are usual in ‘interpretative criticism’: ‘the function of narratology is not to recompose what textology decomposes’.136

As the above quotations show, Genette gives his support to a de-scription-oriented narratology primarily because he is sceptical to-wards textual interpretation in the traditional sense.137 These par-ticular reservations, however, are not shared by most other suppor-ters of a description-oriented narrative theory; instead, they argue that narratology should be conceived of as a descriptive tool be-cause they believe that textual description is not simply a way to avoid working with interpretations but actually, more than anything else, a means of developing and improving them. It is precisely when narratology is understood as a language of description rather than an approach to understanding texts, they suggest, that it can make a meaningful contribution to textual interpretation. Mieke Bal developed this idea as follows in the preface to the English version of her book Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narra-tive:138

Conceived as a set of tools, as a means to express and specify one’s interpre-tive reactions to a text, the theory presented here holds no claim for certainty. It is not from a positivistic desire for absolute, empirical knowledge that this theory and its instrumental character should be considered to have been gen-erated. It is, quite the opposite, conceived as it is because interpretation, al-

135 Genette (1988). The original French version is entitled Nouveau discours du récit (Genette 1983).

136 Genette (1988, 155). ‘Impositions de “cohérence”’; ‘critique interprétative’; ‘la fonction de la narratologie n’est pas de recomposer ce que la textologie décompose’ (Genette 1983, 108).

137 On this position, see also Sontag (1967). A detailed study of Sontag’s essay can be found in Spree (1995, 59–136), a typological classification of it in Kindt and Müller (2003d, 298–301).

138 Bal (1985). Bal’s book was first published in 1977 in French, then in a re-vised version in Dutch in 1980, and in modified form again in English in 1985. The second edition of the latter, to which a new preface has been ad-ded, appeared in 1997.


though not absolutely arbitrary since it does, or should, interact with a text, is in practice unlimited and free. Hence, I find the need for a discourse that makes each interpretation expressible, accessible, communicable. … The tools proposed can be put to varied uses. I have myself used the theory for both aesthetic and ideological criticism … . Hence, the need of more theory, beyond narratology: a theory that accounts for the functions and positions of texts of different backgrounds, genres, and historical periods. One need not adhere to structuralism as a philosophy in order to be able to use the concepts and views presented in this book. Neither does one need to feel that adherence to, for example, a deconstructionist, Marxist or feminist view of literature hin-ders the use of this book.139

Like most exponents of a description-oriented narrative theory, Bal is convinced that the narratological description of a text should be seen as both a prerequisite for and impetus behind the interpretive determination of its meaning:

An interpretation is never anything more than a proposal … . If a proposal is to be accepted, it must be well founded … . If a proposal is based upon a pre-cise description it can be discussed. The theory presented here is an instru-ment for making descriptions and, as such, it inevitably but only indirectly leads to interpretation.140

Statements of this kind should not be seen simply as attempts to ex-plicate the programme of a descriptive narratology;141 they also give an impression of the underlying position that is adopted when media studies and the text-based disciplines make use of narrative theory and individual concepts drawn from it.142

139 Bal (1985, x; emphasis in original). 140 Bal (1985, 10). 141 See Kindt and Müller (2003b, 2003d) for a further exploration of this issue. 142 It would be possible to give a long list of works as examples; regrettably,

however, there is currently no empirical study available on the use of narra-tive theory and its concepts in cultural studies.


The Descriptivist Rejection of the Concept

Without exception, the concept of the implied author has been re-jected in descriptive narratology. The various objections that expo-nents of this type of reception have advanced against Booth’s con-cept, however, concern the external status of the implied author rather than the internal nature of the concept itself—they simply establish that the implied author is an interpretive category and thus has no place in a narratology conceived of as a descriptive tool that informs the study of epic texts.

The representatives of this type of reception do not normally jus-tify their opinion of the implied author in any detail; for most of them, it is self-evident that Booth’s concept does not belong in the ambit of narratology.143 Genette, for example, mentions the implied author in Narrative Discourse Revisited only because his disregard for it in Narrative Discourse met with criticism on several occa-sions.144 For him, the implied author is not a concept of narrative theory, and he sees no reason to doubt this view. As far as narratol-ogy is concerned, his position is expressed in the suggestion of ‘ex-cluding from the narratological field not only the real author but also the “implied” author, or more exactly the question … of his existence’. Why? ‘Narratology has no need to go beyond the narra-tive situation, and the two agents “implied author” and “implied reader” are clearly situated in that “beyond”’.145

143 As Genette (1988, 137) puts it, ‘the “implied” author … does not, for me, lie within the province of narratology’. (‘L’auteur “impliqué” … n’est pas pour moi du ressort de la narratologie’; Genette 1983, 94). On this position, see also Briosi (1986).

144 Rimmon-Kenan, for example, expressed such criticism in the review of the Discourse to which we have already referred above (see Rimmon 1976, 57–58).

145 Genette (1988, 137). (‘Une réponse commode consisterait … à exclure du champ narratologique non seulement l’auteur réel, mais aussi l’auteur “im-pliqué”, ou plus exactement la question ... de son existence’; ‘la narratologie n’a pas à aller au-delà de l’instance narrative, et les instances de l’implied author et de l’implied reader se situent clairement dans cet au-delà ; Genette 1983, 94).


Only two supporters of a description-oriented narrative theory, Mieke Bal and Nilli Diengott, give a more detailed treatment of Booth’s concept. In her proposals for developing Genette’s focal-ization theory a step further, Bal has taken the view that, because the implied author of a work denotes the normative moral order of that work, it can be identified only by interpreting, not by describ-ing, the text concerned.146 Thus, to avoid confusion, she suggests, it would be better to abandon the term ‘implied author’ altogether; it would be more appropriate, she feels, ‘to speak of the interpretation, or the overall meaning of the text’.147 In her Narratology, too, Bal sets out to show why she believes Booth’s concept should not be understood as one belonging to narrative theory. The implied author is not to be determined by means of description, she writes, and can be reconstructed in the case of non-narrative texts as well as narra-tive ones:

The term was introduced by Booth … in order to discuss and analyse the ideo-logical and moral stances of a narrative text without having to refer directly to a biographical author. In Booth’s use of the term, it denotes the totality of meanings that can be inferred from a text. Thus the implied author is the re-sult of the investigation of the meaning of a text, and not the source of that meaning. Only after interpreting the text on the basis of the text description can the implied author be inferred and discussed. Moreover, the notion of an implied author is, in this sense, not limited to nar-rative texts, but is of application to any text. This is why the notion is not spe-cific to narratology.148

The most detailed treatment of the epistemic status of Booth’s con-cept is to be found in an essay published by Nilli Diengott in 1993. Her remarks on the implied author, too, are based on the view that narratology should not be understood as an approach to textual in-terpretation or a discipline that serves to support it.149 Taking Benja-

146 See Bal (1981b, 209): ‘The term [“implied author”] denotes the “norms and values of the text.” Those norms and values can be found by interpretation.’

147 Bal (1981b, 209). 148 Bal (1985, 119–20; emphasis in original). 149 Diengott (1988, 49) makes this particularly clear in her response to Susan S.

Lanser’s proposal for combining narratology and feminism: ‘Lanser is inter-ested in interpretation, but narratology is a totally different activity’. On the


min Hrushovsky’s ideas on subdivisions in the field of literary the-ory as her starting point, she treats narrative theory as a component part of systematic poetics.150 In earlier work, Diengott had drawn on the implied author concept without feeling that further reflection was necessary,151 but this is no longer the case in her 1993 essay, in which she is prompted to discuss it by the observation that there is a striking lack of agreement in scholarship about how the concept should be treated: ‘implied author is briefly discussed by some po-etics, is totally omitted by others, but is found under narratorial reli-ability in interpretations’.152 Diengott believes that this inconsis-tency frequently appears because the specific theoretical status of Booth’s category has not been appreciated. Unlike the concepts of fabula and syuzhet, say, the implied author is in her view not to be seen as part of a descriptive approach to modelling texts; instead, she says, Booth’s concept is, like the categories of motivation and theme, bound closely to semantic factors and can be identified only through interpretation:

all three concepts belong neither to poetics of narrative nor to interpretation, but to a poetics (a theory) of interpretation, i.e., to thematics—a field of study which is only now in the process of attempts at systematization. The unclear status of these concepts in current critical use stems from, on the one hand, their belonging to a theoretical field (but not to narrative poetics), while on the other being intimately connected with the meaning-making (semantic) activity of interpretation.153

Diengott-Lanser dispute, see also Lanser (1986, 1988) and the overviews in Nünning (1994), Prince (1996), Allrath (2000), Allrath and Gymnich (2002), and Nünning and Nünning (2004).

150 See Hrushovsky (1976). Against the background of Hrushovsky’s systematic outline, Diengott (1988, 43) remarks that ‘it seems to me that if this mapping of the field within the study of literature is kept in mind, narratology belongs under theoretical poetics’.

151 Diengott (1986/87, 1990), for example. 152 Diengott (1993a, 184). 153 Diengott (1993a, 189).


Ansgar Nünning’s essay ‘Renaissance eines anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts oder Nachruf auf ein literaturkritisches Phantom?’,154

which was also published in 1993, has a special place in discussion of the implied author in the context of textual description. Nün-ning’s piece is set apart from other work belonging to this type of reception in two respects. First, it does more than just question whether the implied author has a place in narratology: Nünning ac-tually presents fundamental objections to Booth’s concept per se,demonstrating the vagueness of its definition and the inconsistency of its theoretical treatment in an analysis as convincing as it is de-tailed.155 Second, unlike the other supporters of descriptive narratol-ogy, Nünning pursues the aim of ‘providing a viable alternative to cover those phenomena that the implied author was introduced to describe and explain’.156 More precisely, he hopes to develop a con-cept that can take the place of Booth’s and at the same time be suit-able for use in a narratology concerned solely with textual descrip-tion.157 The category that Nünning believes can do this is the ‘ab-stract structural level of the entire text’.158 He defines this concept as follows:

It involves … a relational and structural category that denotes the relationship between the elements of a text—the overall structure of the text, that is to say.

154 Nünning (1993). The title can be translated as ‘The Renaissance of an Anthropomorphized Passe-partout or a Monument to a Phantom of Literary Criticism?’. For a detailed reconstruction and appraisal of Nünning’s ideas, see Kindt and Müller (1999, 273–77). In subsequent work on the implied au-thor, Nünning has slightly modified the position he adopted in 1993. See, for example, Nünning (1997, 2001, 2005a).

155 See Nünning (1993, 3–11). 156 Nünning (1993, 2). ‘Eine tragfähige Alternative für jene Phänomene zu lie-

fern, für deren Beschreibung und Erklärung der implied author ins Leben ge-rufen worden ist’ (my translation).

157 Nünning does not set this objective out explicitly, but, as Heinen (2002, 333) rightly observes, it is clear from his discussion that he ‘is interested not in in-terpretive but rather in descriptive models’ (‘nicht an Interpretations-, son-dern an Deskriptionsmodellen interessiert ist’; my translation).

158 Nünning (1993, 23). ‘Abstrakte Strukturniveau des Gesamttextes’ (my trans-lation).


An abstract structural level of this kind subsumes the totality of all the struc-tural relations of contrast and correspondence that are formed by the similari-ties and differences between textual elements on the levels of communication of the characters and the narrator. These relations of contrast and correspon-dence constitute a virtual structure that is not realized until the process of re-ception takes place.159

For a variety of reasons, Nünning’s remarks on the concept of the ‘whole work’ are not convincing.160 They leave open, for example, the fundamental question of whether recipients identifying the ‘level of the entire work’ for a text determine only the structure of that level or also its elements.161 The main reason why the ‘struc-tural level of the entire text’ is not convincing as a replacement ca-tegory for Booth’s implied author, however, lies less in the short-comings of its definition than in the vagueness of its function. In-tending to model a descriptive alternative concept to that of the im-plied author, Nünning ends up with a category of dubious useful-ness to the projects of describing and interpreting texts alike.

The concept of the ‘whole work’ is probably of little use in de-scriptive literary analysis because the latter needs concepts that al-low textual structures to be determined unambiguously. Nünning’s replacement category for the implied author, however, does not do this: it stands for an unordered set of contrast and correspondence relations that are potentially contradictory and have the potential to reach unmanageable proportions. Nor would the concept of a su-perordinate abstract structural level seem particularly well suited to fulfilling the needs of textual interpretation. Nünning explicitly

159 Nünning (1993, 19). ‘Es handelt sich … um eine relationale und strukturelle Kategorie, die die Beziehungen zwischen den Elementen eines Textes, eben dessen Gesamtstruktur, bezeichnet. Eine solche abstrakte Strukturebene um-faßt die Summe aller strukturellen Kontrast- und Korrespondenzbezüge, die sich durch die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen textuellen Ele-menten auf den Kommunikationsebenen der Figuren und des Erzählers erge-ben. Diese Kontrast- und Korrespondenzrelationen bilden eine virtuelle Struktur, die erst im Rezeptionsprozeß realisiert wird’ (my translation).

160 Nünning (1993 18). ‘Werkganze[s]’ (my translation). 161 ‘Ebene des Gesamtwerkes’ (my translation). For details, see Kindt and Mül-

ler (1999, 275 n. 7).


points out that the category he puts forward has the advantage of being ‘of considerable benefit to interpretive applications’,162 some-thing that Booth’s concept lacks. In the process, however, Nünning overlooks the fact that making a vague concept more precise does not necessarily increase its usefulness in a theoretical context. In-deed, as the ‘whole work’ concept shows, precisely the opposite can be the case: Nünning’s suggestion is essentially based on a modifi-cation of the definition of Booth’s concept that does not seem par-ticularly remarkable. The basic idea of his explication is that the concept of the abstract structural level should stand only for the sum of all the elements of and structures in a text, not for the principle behind their selection and arrangement.163 Now, it is not hard to see that a category conceived of in this way has a more precise defini-tion than the concept of the implied author and that its use can in principle be better controlled than that of the latter. But it is equally clear that it cannot be used as a replacement for Booth’s concept in the context of textual interpretation. Reconstructing the ‘whole work’ of a text amounts to the same thing as comprehensively de-scribing its basic structures; identifying the implied author of a work, however, involves going further than this and discovering the rhetorical plan behind the work.164 Nünning’s alternative category, in other words, gains the ability to be used in a transparent manner by abandoning the very claim that makes the implied author so po-pular in interpretive contexts, the claim that it is possible to derive from the description of textual structures the idea that underlies the composition of a text.165

162 Nünning (1993, 24). ‘Hohen interpretatorischen Anwendungswerts’ (my translation).

163 Unlike the implied author, then, the ‘whole work’ is what empirical reception theory would call a ‘Kommunikatbasis’ rather than a ‘Kommunikat’: it is the structural prerequisite for, rather than the concrete result of, reception of a text (see Nünning 1993, 24–25). See Schmidt (1980/82, 94–97) for a defini-tion of the terms ‘Kommunikat’ und ‘Kommunikatbasis’.

164 This fundamental difference is rarely given sufficient consideration in the im-plied author debate (see Kindt and Müller 2003c, 418–19). On this issue, see also Heinen (2006, 40–41).

165 See 2.2.2 above.


The Significance of the Implied Author beyond Textual Description

It would be a mistake to believe that all responses to the implied au-thor in the context of description make do with labelling Booth’s concept an interpretive one and thereby denying it a role in narra-tive theory. First and foremost, it is Nilli Diengott and Gérard Ge-nette who have not been content to make do with expressing the belief that the implied author has no place in a narratology con-ceived of as a language of description. In their discussions of the concept, they also seek to determine how significant the category could be in the wider context of a comprehensive approach to the study of texts.

Diengott sets out to do this in a piece entitled ‘The Implied Au-thor Once Again’, which was published in the Journal of Literary Semantics in 1993. Returning to her ideas on the epistemological status of Booth’s concept,166 Diengott here puts forward the thesis that, although the implied author cannot be used in a narratological context, it is perfectly possible to use it profitably in the interpreta-tion of texts. At least, she explains, this is so if it is treated as an entity that is inherently semantically determined and thus identifi-able only by means of interpretation (she distances herself here from Chatman’s defence of the implied author). Taking up Rim-mon-Kenan’s ideas, Diengott writes that ‘implied author should be understood … as a depersonified interpretive construct, part of the meaning of a text’, that it ‘is definitely not an agent in narrative transmission’.167 Diengott believes that an implied author under-stood in this way makes an important contribution to textual inter-pretation for two reasons. First, it prevents us from making the mistake of directly identifying the ideology of a work with the au-thor’s system of values; second, it allows us to elucidate complex forms of communication such as unreliable narration. Diengott ar-rives at the following conclusion on the concept and its name:

166 See 2.2.3 above. 167 Diengott (1993b, 73). See also Diengott (2004, 312).


What I am suggesting is that once one accepts the logic of paying attention only to the ‘implied’ part of the term not only is any confusion clarified but the term is applicable within the interpretive activity and is extremely useful in discussing literary works. … Why retain the term and not change it? For practical reasons—it is familiar and has proved useful in many practical dis-cussions of texts.168

The uses of Booth’s concept outside the context of textual descrip-tion are examined in considerably greater detail by Genette in his Narrative Discourse Revisited. Starting from the belief that the im-plied author, as a sophisticated cross-generic category, does not have a place in narratology, he sets out to investigate whether it might nonetheless be possible, perhaps even necessary, to make use of the concept in literary and interpretation theory. Genette’s ap-proach to this question is based on two main principles. First, like most commentators on the implied author, he assumes that the im-plied author is not a sender involved in textual communication;169

rather, he believes, Booth’s concept should be understood as an image of the author apprehended by the reader, ‘as an image of the (real) author constructed by the text and perceived of as such by the reader’.170 Second, Genette’s treatment is based on the belief that a concept defined in this way can be legitimately used only if identi-fying the implied author of a text is distinguished from reconstruct-ing its real author: ‘Logically speaking … an image has no features

168 Diengott (1993b, 73–74). 169 See (Genette 1988, 139–40): ‘a narrative of fiction is produced fictively by

its narrator and actually by its (real) author. No one is toiling away between them, and every type of textual performance can be attributed only to one or the other, depending on the level chosen.’ (‘Un récit des fiction est fictive-ment produit par son narrateur, et effectivement par son auteur (réel); entre eux, personne ne travaille, et toute espèce de performance textuelle ne peut être attribuée qu’à l’un ou à l’autre, selon le plan adopté’; Genette 1983, 96). On this issue, see also Genette (1990).

170 Genette (1988, 140; emphasis in original). ‘Une image de l’auteur (réel) con-struite par le texte et perçue comme telle par le lecteur’ (Genette 1983, 97).


that are distinct (from those of its model) and thus deserves no spe-cial mention, unless it is unfaithful—that is, incorrect.’171

These two assumptions provide the foundation for Genette’s as-sessment of the relevance of Booth’s concept to literary theory. He proceeds by discussing various forms of literary communication in which there is a mismatch between the reader’s author-construct on the one hand and the actual author of the text and his intentions on the other. In Genette’s view, there are two basics ways in which misconstruction of author-images can arise: discrepancy between the constructed author and the real author of a work, he says, results either from the ‘competence of the reader’ or from the ‘performance of the (real) author’.172

Genette’s first case, that of reader-induced incongruence between the recipient’s author-image and the real author, occurs when re-cipients develop a false picture of a work’s author because they lack certain linguistic, historical, or cultural knowledge. Genette reports that this phenomenon can be observed again and again in the recep-tion history of individual texts but is not, however, a convincing reason to assume the presence of an implied author—we are dealing here with the behaviour of empirical readers, whereas he believes that the discussions of interpretation theory should be oriented around the concept of an ideally competent recipient: ‘That does not necessarily mean … superhuman intelligence, but a minimum of ordinary perspicuity and a good mastery of the codes involved, in-cluding, of course, language.’173

Genette treats the second case, that of author-induced incongru-ence between the recipient’s author-image and the real author, in somewhat more detail. Such mismatches occur when writers use

171 Genette (1988, 141). ‘En bonne logique …, une image n’a de traits distincts (de ceux de son modèle), et donc ne mérite une mention spéciale, que si elle infidèle, c’est-à-dire incorrecte’ (Genette 1983, 97).

172 Genette (1988, 141, 142). ‘Compétence du lecteur’; ‘performance de l’auteur (réel)’ (Genette 1983, 98).

173 Genette (1988, 141). ‘Cela ne signifié pas nécessairement … une intelligence surhumaine, mais un minimum de perspicacité banale, et une bonne maîtrise des codes en jeu, dont bien sûr la langue’ (Genette 1983, 98).


their works to encourage the construction of an author-image that differs from the way they actually see themselves. Genette distin-guishes two basic ways in which this can happen in literary commu-nication. If an author provides readers with an inaccurate image of himself in a text,174 he does so either intentionally or unintention-ally; thus, we are to distinguish between the ‘involuntary revelation … of a subconscious personality’ and the ‘deliberate simulation, by the real author and in his work, of a personality different from his real personality or the idea he has of it’.175

Genette speaks of involuntary revelation in the case of literary communication processes in which recipients conclude that the au-thor of a work was mistaken about his intentions, that the text ex-presses a stance its author himself is not aware of. Genette refers to psychoanalytic and marxist interpretations to illustrate this kind of discrepancy between a reader’s reconstruction of an author and an author’s understanding of himself. Such readings purport to show the writers of literary texts what intentions were really behind their work.176 For Genette, of course, communication processes in which involuntary revelation takes place are, again, not enough to demon-strate the presence of an implied author. The author reconstructed for a work in the case of involuntary revelation is, he suggests, not really different from the real one at all, for interpretations of this kind claim to be able to understand the author of a text better than he understood himself. Thus, Genette concludes: ‘IA = RA’, and so, ‘Exit IA.’177

174 Genette (1988, 142) speaks of an ‘unfaithful image’ (‘image infidèle’; Ge-nette 1983, 98).

175 Genette (1988, 142, 144; italics in original). ‘Révélation involontaire … d’une personnalité inconsciente’; ‘simulation volontaire, par l’auteur réel et dans son œuvre, d’une personnalité différente de sa personnalité réelle’ (Ge-nette 1983, 98–99; italics in original).

176 Suggesting that involuntary revelation occurs in a text does not, of course, commit us to a specific mode of interpretation; the phenomenon can be men-tioned in intentionalistic, trans-intentionalistic, and non-intentionalistic read-ings (see Strube 2000 on these types of interpretation).

177 Genette (1988, 143). ‘IA’, of course, stands for ‘implied author’, ‘RA’ for ‘real author’. ‘AI = AR’; ‘Exit AI’ (Genette 1983, 99).


Genette uses the term ‘deliberate simulation’ to cover those kinds of communication in which a work gives the impression that its author is presenting the image of a figure different from who he really is. Genette is not concerned with forgery, stylistic imitation, or plagiarism here; instead, he is referring to literary works whose value systems differ from those of their extradiegetic narrators.178

Here again he concludes that, even if such cases are not uncommon in literature, they do not in any way point to the presence of an im-plied author: the positions and values that find direct or indirect ex-pression in a text are, for him, to be ascribed either to its fictive narrator or to its empirical author. In other words: according to Ge-nette, positions communicated behind the back, so to speak, of a work’s narrator help to create a picture of the text’s empirical pro-ducer.179 As with involuntary revelation, so too in the case of de-liberate simulation he sees no difference between the real and re-constructed author, and thus he again concludes: ‘IA = RA, and exit IA’.180

Genette’s overall conclusion is that accepting Booth’s concept leads to an incomplete picture of the process of literary communi-cation, one in which either the fictive narrator or the real author is overlooked:

So IA seems to me, in general, to be an imaginary (‘residual,’ says Mieke Bal) agent constituted by two distinctions that remain blind to each other: (1) IA is not the narrator, (2) IA is not the real author, and it is never seen that the first is a matter of the real author and the second is the matter of the narrator, with no room anywhere for a third agent that would be neither the narrator nor the real author.181

178 See 2.2.2 above. 179 Without registering it, Genette is here adopting a position that corresponds to

Juhl’s intentionalistic criticism of Booth’s concept (see Juhl 1980a, 1980b, and also 2.1.2 above).

180 Genette (1988, 145). ‘AI = AR, et exit AI’ (Genette 1983, 100). 181 Genette (1988, 145; emphasis in original). ‘AI me semble donc, en général,

une instance fantôme (“résiduelle”, dit Mieke Bal), constituée par deux dis-tinctions qui s’ignorent réciproquement: 1) AI n’est pas le narrateur, 2) AI n’est pas l’auteur réel, sans voir que dans 1) il s’agit de l’auteur réel, et dans 2) du narrateur, et que nulle part il n’y a place pour un troisième instance que


Genette’s treatment of the implied author stands out because of its originality and the stringency of its systematic approach, but it has met with little resonance in the wider discussion of Booth’s con-cept.182 One reason for this must certainly be the fact that Genette’s remarks go against the flow of mainstream responses in so far as he treats the implied author as a category of literary theory rather than of narratology. The passages from Narrative Discourse Revisited discussed above may also, of course, have found so little attention because Genette’s argumentation sidesteps the various debates that have taken place on the implied author in relation to interpretation theory and interpretation in practice during the preceding decades.

Most fundamentally, this is the case with the underlying thesis in Genette’s discussion of the possibilities of literary communication surveyed above, the thesis that it is legitimate to employ the implied author only if reconstructing it is not equivalent to reconstructing the real author. With this thesis, Genette has indeed found a plausi-ble criterion for deciding whether to adopt the concept, but he ap-pears to overlook the fact that use of the implied author can be and has been justified in other ways—with, for example, the aesthetic maxim that works of art are autonomous, the psychological thesis that it is not possible to ascertain the intentions of authors, and the pragmatist argument that texts can be interpreted without making recourse to context. One obvious reason why Genette does not pick up the threads of preceding responses to the implied author lies in concept of the author, or authorial intention, in terms of which he operates. This can be seen particularly clearly from his views on those cases in which what he refers to as involuntary revelation oc-curs in literary communication. Genette says that such cases should not be seen as arguments in favour of assuming the presence of an

ne serait ni le narrateur ni l’auteur réel’ (Genette 1983, 100). After drawing this conclusion, Genette considers a number of further, somewhat arcane pos-sibilities of literary communication; in the process, he identifies a discrep-ancy between the reconstructed author and the real author in some cases, but this does not change his basic position on Booth’s concept (Genette 1988, 145–48).

182 Walsh (1997, 508–10) is an exception.


implied author because it is self-evident to him that the text being interpreted provides part, or even all, of the basis on which the in-tentions of the real author are determined. This view has since be-come widespread in the interpretation theory debate,183 but the con-fusion of intentionalism with biographism and psychologism has prevented it from establishing itself in the implied author dispute.184

In implied author reception, the author is as a rule understood as an entity to be approached independently of the work being studied—from the direction of his biography or texts in which he discusses himself and/or his work, for example.

2.3 The Model Author and Other Author Models: Alternative Concepts to the Implied Author

One effect of the developments that took place in the academic study of literature from the mid-1960s onwards was, as we have seen, a far-reaching reorientation of the implied author debate.185

This was, however, by no means their only consequence: as a result of the boom in models based on communication theory and posi-tions based on the aesthetics of reception,186 the study of literature saw a multitude of alternative categories to Booth’s concept appear after 1970. Umberto Eco drew up the following list of such sugges-

183 See, for example, the essays in Iseminger (1992a), Jannidis et al. (1999), or Detering (2002).

184 On distinguishing intentionalism from psychologism and biographism, see Hirsch (1967), Danneberg and Müller (1983), and Kindt and Müller (2002).

186 See 2.2 above. 186 On communication theory, see, from the point of view of narrative theory,

Petersen (1980), and the essays in Hass and König (2003) for a more general perspective; on the aesthetics of reception, see, for programmatic statements, Warning (1975), Suleiman and Crosman (1980), or Tompkins (1980), and, for retrospective historical treatments, Holub (1984), Müller (1988), or, most recently, Adam (2003).


tions in 1990; although it makes no claim to completeness, it none-theless gives some impression of the remarkable creativity with which new concepts and terms had been devised in the drive to de-scribe processes of literary communication in the preceding dec-ades:

The dialectics between Author and Reader, Sender and Addressee, Narrator and Narratee has generated a crowd, indeed impressive, of semiotic or extra-fictional narrators, subjects of the uttered utterance (énonciation énoncée), fo-calizers, voices, metanarrators, as well as an equally impressive crowd of vir-tual, ideal, implied or implicit, model, projected, presumed, informed readers, metareaders, archireaders, and so on.187

In the following pages, we shall provide a brief overview of the concepts that have been introduced as alternatives to the implied author since the 1970s.188 Our survey begins by concentrating on what are probably the three most prominent new concepts to follow Booth’s: Eco’s Model Author (2.3.1), Wolf Schmid’s abstract au-thor (2.3.2) und Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader (2.3.3).189 Our por-trayal and discussion of these three concepts provides the back-ground for our concluding discussion of a series of additional author concepts (2.3.4). The concepts in the latter group originate not in

187 Eco (1990b, 44). ‘Dagli inizi degli anni sessanta in avanti si sono così molti-plicate le teorie sulla coppia Lettore-Autore, e oggi abbiami, oltre all narra-tore e al narrataririo, narratori semiotici, narratori extrafittizi, soggetti della enunciazione enunciata, focalizzatori, voci, metanarratori, e poi lettori virtu-ali, lettori ideali, lettore modello, superlettori, lettore progettati, lettore infor-mati, arcilettori, lettore impliciti, metalettori e via dicendo’ (Eco 1990a, 16).

188 Although the many competing author models have rarely (only in Stecker 1987, 258–72; 1997, 188–205) been considered together to date, the spec-trum of reader models put forward in the past few decades has received sev-eral comparative treatments. Iser (1978, 27–38) is an early example; more re-cently, see Wilson (1981, 848–63) and, for a report on the current situation, Rabinowitz (1995, 382–401).

189 Other author constructs like, for example, the “created author” (Hix 1990, 163–193), the “scriptor” (Kirby 1992, 4–5), ”the “urauthor” (Irwin 2002, 194–195) or the “represented author” (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003, 74–77; 2004, 318) cannot be considered here.


debates in narratology or reception theory but in discussions about the philosophy of art, fictionality theory, and interpretation theory.

2.3.1 Umberto Eco’s Model Author

One concept competing with the implied author that has attracted considerable attention and found widespread use in the study of literature is the Model Author. This category was put forward by Umberto Eco and is a key concept in the theory of interpretation that he drew up in his 1979 monograph Lector in fabula and has subsequently elaborated in a series of studies and lectures.190 The belief that texts present us with intentionally structured and thus strategically composed wholes is crucial to Eco’s approach:

We could say … that a text is a product whose interpretation must be part of the true mechanism of its creation: bringing a text into being means pursuing a strategy in which the moves another person is expected to make are taken into consideration—as is indeed the case in any strategy.191

From this assertion Eco derives two further assumptions that are essential to his model of the interpretation of fictional and factual texts. With his 1962 collection of essays on the philosophy of art,

190 The following works are of particular importance in the subsequent develop-ment of the Lector in fabula (Eco 1979a) approach: the collection of essays in The Limits of Interpretation (Eco 1990b; I limiti dell’interpretazione, Eco1990a), and two books based on lecture series, Interpretation and Overinter-pretation (Eco 1992a) and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Eco 1994). Overviews of Eco’s work and its evolution can be found in, for example, Burkhardt/Rohse (1991), Mersch (1993), Capozzi (1997a), Kindt and Müller (2000), Schalk (2000), Schultze-Seehof (2001), Bremer (2002), and Musarra (2002).

191 Eco (1979a, 54; emphasis in original). ‘Possiamo dire … che un testo è un prodotto la cui sorte interpretativa deve far parte del proprio meccanismo generativo: generare un testo significa attuare una strategia di cui fan parte le previsioni delle mosse altrui—come d’altra parte in ogni strategia’ (my trans-lation).


Opera aperta, and his 1968 work on semiotics, La struttura as-sente,192 he had made a significant contribution to the ideas behind the reception theories of the 1960s and their establishment in a dis-ciplinary context. In accordance with those theories, the first as-sumption of Eco’s Lector in fabula model is that we can obtain a reasonable idea of what a text means only if we consider the process that takes place when the text is received. This view is expressed when Eco writes in Lector in fabula that a text should be seen as ‘a lazy machine’, one that ‘requires the reader to contribute a consid-erable amount of effort in order, so to speak, to fill in the empty spaces that have been left blank, the spaces where what has not been said and what has already been said belong’.193 The second component of crucial importance to Eco’s approach is a scepticism towards radicalizing the views of reception theory in the manner proposed by advocates of poststructuralism in particular, as well as by supporters of constructivism and the empirical study of litera-ture. Even if recipients have certain freedoms when interpreting a text, he believes, it is clear that the process of assigning meaning is nonetheless subject to certain restrictions. In The Limits of Inter-pretation, he writes accordingly that ‘if there are not rules that help to ascertain which interpretations are the “best ones,” there is at least a rule for ascertaining which ones are “bad”.’194

In Eco’s opinion, then, texts do not specify exactly how they should be understood, but nor do they lend themselves to any under-

192 An English translation of a revised version of Opera aperta (Eco 1962) is available, as is a considerably revised English version of La struttura assente (Eco 1968): The Open Work (Eco 1989) and A Theory of Semiotics (Eco 1976) respectively.

193 Eco (1979a, 24–25). ‘il testo è una macchina pigra che esige dal lettore un fiero lavoro cooperativo per riempire spazi di non-detto o di già-detto rimasti per così dire in bianco’ (my translation).

194 Eco (1990b, 60). ‘È impossibile dire qual sia la migliore interpretazione di un testo, ma è possibile dire quali siano sbagliate’ (Eco 1990a, 107). In the pre-sent context, we can ignore the question of whether Eco, by making such comments in his publications from 1970 onwards, has distanced himself the positions he had adopted in the preceding decades. On this issue, see Schalk (2000, 145–92).


standing whatsoever either. Eco therefore aims to develop a theory of interpretation that reflects both the scope open to reception proc-esses and the limits to which they are subject. His ideas on the problem of textual interpretation are meant, as he puts it at the be-ginning of the 1990 Tanner Lectures, to reflect the ‘dialectics be-tween the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters’.195 The key element in Eco’s pursuit of this ambitious goal is the suggestion that texts be considered from the perspective of communication theory. However, this does not mean that his model of interpretation advocates reconstructing the aims or impressions of real participants in processes of textual communication—he believes that critical in-terpretation should not be concerned with determining the intention of a text’s writer or the opinions of its recipients. He opposes pur-suing the writer’s intention because, he says, it is not usually pos-sible to reconstruct the intentions of a work’s empirical author, which are potentially irrelevant to textual interpretation anyway; the recipients’ opinions should be left out of the equation because it often turns out that different readers of a text react very differently to it depending on their individual historical and cultural situations. The study of literature, Eco concludes, should concern itself not with authors or recipients but with texts:

Between the mysterious history of a textual production and the uncontrollable drift of its future readings, the text qua text still represents a comfortable pres-ence, the point to which we can stick.196

In suggesting that texts should be subjected to analysis from the perspective of communication theory, then, Eco is not trying to make their production or reception the object of study. Instead, he wants their structure as communication to be examined; his model of interpretation is intended to draw our attention away from the two sides of the act of utterance and direct it at the actantial roles of

195 Eco (1992a, 23). On this objective, see also Eco (1968, 165; 1990b, 6). 196 Eco (1992a, 88). An alternative formulation of this view can be found in Eco

(1992a, 78): ‘Between the unattainable intention of the author and the argu-able intention of the reader there is the transparent intention of the text’. On this position, see also Eco (1979a, 79–80; 1992b, 820).


what is uttered instead.197 Lying behind the line taken by Eco’s the-ory here is the assumption that texts, as strategically arranged wholes, anticipate that their recipients will work with them in par-ticular ways. Depending on one’s perspective, the anticipated mode of interaction can be understood as being put forward by a Model Author or as constituting the role of a Model Reader. Thus, these two concepts are introduced in an attempt to use communication theory to illustrate the idea that an unambiguous basic meaning can be found for any text as long as it is read with reference to the lexi-con and world knowledge of the time in which it originated. Eco, in other words, introduces the concepts of the Model Author and the Model Reader as entities to which he can attribute what he has de-scribed as textual strategy for a long time and referred to as the in-tention of the text or ‘intentio operis’ since the mid-1980s.198 Eco summarizes his ideas about the participants in communication he has introduced by stating in Lector in fabula

that a Model Author is present as an interpretive hypothesis when the subject of the textual strategy that emerges from the text under consideration enters into a configuration, and not when it is felt that there is an empirical subject behind the text that had the intention, or thought about, or perhaps thought about intending to say something other than what the text—in terms of the codes with which it operates—says to its Model Reader.199

Eco’s response to the Modern Language Notes special issue Swing-ing Foucault’s Pendulum make clear that he arrives at this picture of textual communication by considering one and the same thing

197 On this distinction, see Eco (1979a, 61). ‘Emittente e Destinatario sono pre-senti nel testo non tanto come poli dell’atto di enunciazione quanto come ruoli attanziali dell’enunciato’ (my translation).

198 On defining the two terms in this way, see, for example Eco (1979, 76–77; 1990b, 48–49).

199 Eco (1979a, 64). ‘Per ora potremmo limitarci a concludere che si ha Autore Modello come ipotesi interpretativa quando ci si configura il soggetto di una strategia testuale, quale appare dal testo in esame e non quando ipotizza, die-tro alla strategia testuale, un soggetto empirico che magari voleva o pensava o voleva pensara cose diverse da quello che il testo, commisurato ai codici cui si riferisce, dice al proprio Lettore Modello’ (my translation). What Eco means by ‘enters into a configuration’ is not entirely clear.


from different perspectives at once. His concepts of the Model Au-thor, the Model Reader, and the intention of the text, that is to say, are coextensive.

The empirical reader is only an actor who makes conjectures about the Model Reader postulated by the text. Since the intention of the text is basically to produce a Model Reader able to make conjectures about it, the initiative of the Model Reader consists of figuring out a Model Author who is not the empiri-cal one and who, at the final end, coincides with the intention of the text.200

In the present context, we need add only that Eco does not under-stand his theory of textual communication simply as a more or less descriptive model of reception processes; he also believes that his approach provides a basis for evaluating interpretations of texts. Re-ference to the intention, Model Author, or Model Reader of a work, he believes, allows one to state what interpretations of it are correct and what ones are not; the concepts, that is to say, allow interpretive hypotheses to be falsified.201 Thus, drawing on Karl R. Popper’s ideas on the validation of scientific theories, Eco assumes that a ‘Popperian principle’ applies to textual interpretation: ‘if there are no rules that help to ascertain which interpretations are the “best” ones, there is at least a rule for ascertaining which ones are “bad”’.202

Eco has indicated several times in his work on interpretation theory that the introduction of the Model Author and Model Reader is part of a tradition of conceptual innovation extending back to The Rheto-ric of Fiction. In ‘Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art’, for ex-ample, he writes: ‘The first who explicitly spoke of an “implied au-thor (carrying the reader with him)” was certainly Wayne Booth

200 Eco (1992b, 821). 201 For reconstruction and detailed appraisal of this claim of Eco’s theory of

interpretation, see Rorty (1992) and Müller (2000). 202 Eco (1992a, 52). Even as early as Lector in fabula, we find Eco (1979a, 60)

remarking that ‘a text is nothing other than the strategy that constitutes the domain of its—if not “legitimate”, then nonetheless legitimizable—interpre-tations’ (‘E un testo altro non è che la strategia che costitisce l’universo delle sue interpretazioni—se non “legittime”—legittimabili’; my translation).


(1961)’.203 Such references to a connection between the Model Au-thor and the implied author do not, of course, provide a full picture of the exact relationship between them. Against the background of our analysis of the definition and use of the two concepts, it is clear not only that they are genealogically related but also that their ex-tensions are the same—the introduction of the Model Author, that is to say, really presents us with the concept of the implied author un-der a different name. Eco may call for the intention of works to be identified, whereas Booth proposes analysing their ethical frame-works, but these are really just two ways of paraphrasing a single interpretive programme, that of reconstructing the principle that un-derlies the selection and arrangement of the elements of a text. Ulti-mately, all that sets Eco’s treatment of the Model Author apart from Booth’s discussion of the implied author is the fact that the former concept is credited with the capability of allowing incorrect inter-pretations of a work to be falsified. Booth does not make any com-parable claims of his concept, although he remained convinced until his death that identifying the implied author is a necessary pre-requisite for the proper interpretation of a work.204

It is not clear whether Eco’s work on interpretation theory re-christens the implied author with the aim of providing a more pre-cise version of Booth’s concept. What is clear is that Eco’s remarks on the category of the Model Author do not result in such an in-crease in precision. Like Booth, Eco appears to be unsure whether he is working towards a quasi-empirical model of how texts are received or a normative theory of how they are interpreted. Conse-quently, like Booth’s treatment of the implied author before him, so too Eco’s remarks on the Model Author are ultimately neither con-ceptually nor methodologically convincing.205

203 Eco (1990b, 46). ‘Il primo cha ha parlato esplicitamente di “implied author (carrying the reader with him)” è stato Wayne Booth nel 1961 con il suo Therhetoric of fiction’ (Eco 1990a, 17).

204 See 1.2.3 above. 205 See 1.2.3 above. An example of Eco’s uncertainty regarding the status of his

position can be found in Eco (1979a, 87–88).


Although Eco distances himself much more stringently from in-tentionalistic positions in his publications on interpretation theory than Booth did, he is still, like Booth, unable to draw a clear dis-tinction between his category (in Eco’s case the Model Author) and that of the author.206 The reason for this is clear—his approach is based on a concept of the text that depends on the idea of intention-ality and thus also on that of the author. Eco repeatedly manages to push this underlying assumption out of sight behind an autopoetic concept of the text according to which the Model Author, Model Reader, and intention of a work all produce each other.207 Alongside references to such a position, however, Eco’s work also contains re-peated remarks which clearly show that he believes the author of a text should be understood not just as a producer but also as an inter-pretive norm: ‘The author presupposes the competence of a Model Reader on the one hand and creates it on the other.’208 Eco repeat-edly uses theses such as this to derive maxims of textual interpreta-tion that do not fit in particularly well with the normally anti-inten-tionalistic rhetoric of his work. In Lector in fabula, for example, he writes that ‘the empirical reader, of course, accepts “philological” responsibilities; he is required, for example, to align himself as closely as possible with the sender’s code’.209

Eco’s uncertainty about the status of his approach can also be seen in the way in which he treats the question of how exactly one should go about identifying the Model Author, the Model Reader, and the intention of a text.210 On the one hand, his remarks on re-constructing these three coextensive concepts repeatedly refer to the transparency of the textual intention—he appears, in other words, to

206 See Capozzi (1997b). 207 See, for example, Eco (1990b, 58–59). 208 Eco (1979a, 56; emphasis in original). ‘L’autore da un lato presuppone ma

dall’altro istituisce la competenza del proprio Lettore Modello’ (my transla-tion).

209 Eco (1979a, 63). ‘Naturalmente il lettore empirico per realizzarsi come Let-tore Modello, ha dei doveri “filologici”: ha cioè il dovere di ricuperare con la massima approssimazione possibile i codici dell’emittente’ (my translation).

210 See Müller (2000, 141–43) for details on this point.


assume that a text unambiguously guides the interpretation of its basic meaning.211 On the other hand, though, Eco points out again and again in the same context that our picture of the communication between the Model Author and the Model Reader of a work does not materialize by itself. In ‘Overinterpreting Texts’, for example, he notes that ‘the text’s intention is not displayed by the textual surface. … One has to decide to “see” it.’212 Thus, Eco places the Model Author in exactly the same exceptional and questionable po-sition between textual description and textual interpretation as that so often associated with the implied author. For Eco, the Model Author stands for a kind of interpretation that is set apart from others because it is suggested by the work under consideration in any given case, which means it can serve as a basis for evaluating other understandings of the text concerned.213

2.3.2 Wolf Schmid’s Abstract Author

If we survey the various competing author models available, we find hardly any categories that have been able to gain lasting gen-eral acceptance alongside the highly influential concepts of Booth and Eco. The abstract author is one of the few concepts that have, in certain areas of discussion at least, established themselves as alter-natives to the implied author and Model Author. This category was introduced by Wolf Schmid in 1973 and has since attained a not inconsiderable degree of popularity in German and Dutch literary

211 See, for example, Eco (1992a, 78). 212 Eco (1992a, 64). 213 See 2.2.3 above. For criticism of this view, see Rorty (1992), Kindt and

Müller (1999), Müller (2000), and Kindt and Müller (2003b, 2003d).


and cultural studies; it is, in fact, not infrequently explicitly seen as preferable to Booth’s concept.214

Schmid’s concept has its origins in the ideas on modelling epic texts that he first presented in his monograph on Dostoevsky’s nar-rative technique and has pursued further in a series of subsequent publications.215 Drawing on formalist-structuralist positions and ideas adopted in the aesthetics of reception, Schmid bases his ap-proach on the idea that works of narrative literature have a status that is at once both autonomous and intentional. When considering epic texts, he believes, we must concern ourselves primarily with their textual structures, yet the latter can be properly grasped only if they are seen as an expression of communicative processes:

With the work come both the author, the subject of the acts that bring forth that individual work and the bearer of the intentions that define the work as a whole, and the addressee, whom the work requires and presupposes and whose reception is thus predetermined in it.216

Building on this assumption, Schmid puts forward a model of com-munication in narrative works that contains the following levels: the text-external levels of author and recipient; the text-internal levels of the characters and the narrator and his addressee; and, above both these levels, an intratextual level of communication where the ab-stract author and abstract reader face one another.217 What is meant by the abstract author, the sender on this latter textual level?

214 See, for example, Kahrmann et al. (1977), Paschen (1991), Mangels (1994), Burdorf (1997), Rooy (1997), Schlickers (1997), Hühn and Schönert (2002), or Schönert (2004).

215 See Schmid (1973, 17–38) for the relevant passage in the original German text, Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs, and Schmid (1974, 1986, 1999, 2005) for examples of Schmid’s subsequent work in this area.

216 Schmid (1973, 23). ‘Sowohl der Autor als das Subjekt der das einzelne Werk hervorbringenden schöpferischen Akte und als der Träger der das Werk im ganzen bestimmenden Intentionen als auch der Adressat, den das Werk zu seiner idealen Erfassung fordert und voraussetzt, dessen Rezeption folglich im Werk vorherbestimmt ist, sind dem Werk mitgegeben’ (my translation).

217 On the abstract reader, not considered in further detail here, see Schmid (2005, 65–72).


The abstract author can … be defined as the principle because of which the layers of sound-form, meaning, and the represented concrete objects, as well as the aesthetic organization and hierarchy of these layers in the overall structure of a work, have the form they do and no other.218

As this general definition of the concept suggests, we should not be too quick in drawing conclusions from the context in which it is introduced. Schmid, for example, presents his concept in the context of a communicative model of epic texts, but, unlike the real author or the fictive narrator, only in a figurative sense does he see it a participant in the literary communication process. Schmid writes on this matter that ‘in so far as the abstract author is not a represented entity, not even a single word of the narrative text can be attributed to him. … He has no voice of his own, no text. His word is the en-tire text on all its levels’.219 Thus, the abstract author is really a se-mantic concept modelled as a pragmatic entity solely for illustrative purposes.220 Consequently, we should, as Reinhard Ibler highlights, bear in mind that ‘communication takes place … through the ab-stract author and abstract reader but does not take place between them’.221

The passages from the concept’s presentation quoted above also make clear that, even though Schmid conceives of the abstract au-thor as an element in a communicative model of narrative works, he

218 Schmid (1973, 24). ‘Der abstrakte Autor läßt sich … definieren als dasjenige Prinzip, das in einem Werk die sprachlautliche Schicht, die Bedeutungs-schicht und die Schicht der dargestellten Gegenständlichkeiten sowie ästheti-sche Organisation und Hierarchie dieser Schichten in der Gesamtstruktur so und nicht anders beschaffen sein läßt’ (my translation).

219 Schmid (2005, 14–15). ‘Insofern der abstrakte Autor keine dargestellte In-stanz ist, kann man ihm kein einzelnes Wort im Erzähltext zuschreiben. … Er hat keine eigene Stimme, keinen Text. Sein Wort ist der ganze Text mit allen seinen Ebenen’ (my translation). On this, see also 2.2.2 above.

220 See Schmid (1986, 303). 221 Ibler (2004, 73; emphasis in original). ‘Die Kommunikation läuft … über

abstrakten Autor und abstrakten Leser, findet aber nicht zwischen ihnen statt’ (my translation). Ibler’s remarks on the abstract reader sidestep Schmid’s definition of the concept—see Ibler (2004, 73) and, in contrast, Schmid (2005, 65–69).


does not see it as a specifically narratological category. He depends on pragmatic aspects of interpretation to justify introducing the en-tity on which his approach is based: it reminds interpreters that lit-erary works are to be understood as ‘communicated communica-tions’.222 Schmid comments on this as follows in his Elemente der Narratologie (‘Elements of Narratology’), in which he writes that

the presence of the abstract author in the model of epic communication makes clear that the narrator, his text, and the meanings expressed in it are all objects of representation. The meanings acquire their final intentional meaning for the work only on the level of the abstract author.223

Like Booth’s treatment of the implied author, Schmid’s comments on the abstract author do not lead to a clear definition of the con-cept, ultimately amounting instead to a series of characterizations of dubious compatibility with one another. Elaborating his definition of the concept as the principle behind the selection and arrangement of the elements in a text, Schmid treats the abstract author as a con-cept at once production- and reception-based, at once syntactic and semantic, without sufficiently explaining how his different descrip-tions relate to one another. He defines it, for example, as a ‘personi-fication of the overall structure of the work’ or as the ‘signified of the work’,224 as the ‘hypostatized “mirror image” of the concrete author, the psycho-physical authorial personality’,225 as a ‘represen-tation of the author in the work’ or as a ‘reader-hypostatized entity in which all the potential meanings of the work converge’,226 as the

222 Janik (1973, 12). 223 Schmid (2005, 64). ‘Die Präsenz des abstrakten Autors im Modell der epi-

schen Kommunikation verdeutlicht das Dargestelltsein des Erzählers, seines Textes und der in ihm ausgedrückten Bedeutungen. Diese Bedeutungen er-halten ihre für das Werk finale Sinnintention erst auf dem Niveau des abs-trakten Autors’ (my translation). See also Schmid (1986, 305).

224 Schmid (1973, 23). ‘Personifikation der Gesamtstruktur des Werks’; ‘Signifi-kat des Werks’ (my translations).

225 Schmid (1973, 24). ‘Hypostasierte “Spiegelbild” des konkreten Autors, der psycho-physischen Dichterpersönlichkeit’ (my translation).

226 Schmid (1999, 8). ‘Repräsentation des Autors im Werk’; ‘vom Leser hypo-stasierte Instanz, in der alle Bedeutungspotentiale des Werks konvergieren’ (my translations).


‘indicial signified’ or ‘semantic centre’ of a text, and as ‘the point where all the creative lines in the work converge’.227

Schmid’s work on epic communication makes no secret of the rela-tionship between his term ‘abstract author’ and Booth’s concept of the implied author.

When Wayne C. Booth introduces the implied author and Russian narrative theory employs the concept of the author-image (‘obraz avtora’, probably originating in Vinogradov), both terms are being used to refer to the entity that I call the abstract author.228

Schmid is perfectly ready to acknowledge this openly on a whole range of occasions, so it is somewhat curious that he never attempts to provide us with reasons for why Booth’s concept should be re-named in the way he suggests. There would be no need for such supporting arguments if the new suggestion were the result of an explication of the implied author that led to a more precise view of the latter. It should, however, be clear from our remarks on the de-finition of Schmid’s concept that this is not the case with the ab-stract author. Like Booth and Eco, Schmid too seems to be unclear as to whether his concept is meant to contribute to an empirically oriented theory of reception or a normatively based theory of inter-pretation. This uncertainty explains why his deliberations on the abstract author turn out to be just as conceptually and methodologi-cally vague as Booth’s remarks on the implied author and Eco’s observations on the Model Author.229

Schmid considers several ways in which the abstract author might be identified in practice, yet despite these suggestions his

227 Schmid (2005, 56, 62). ‘Indiziales signifié’; ‘das semantische Zentrum’; ‘jenen Punkt, in dem alle schöpferischen Linien des Werks zusammenlaufen’ (my translations).

228 Schmid (1973, 24). ‘Wenn Wayne C. Booth den “implied author” einführt und die russische Erzähltheorie mit dem—wohl auf Vinogradov zurückge-henden—Begriff des “Autorbildes” (“obraz avtora”) operiert, so ist in beiden Termini diejenige Instanz gemeint, die ich abstrakter Autor nenne’ (my translation). See also Schmid (2005, 56–61).

229 See 1.2.3 and 2.3.1 above.


discussion ultimately fails to make clear what exactly we are look-ing for when interpreting a text with the aim of identifying its ab-stract author. There are times when our objective seems to take shape clearly enough, as for example when Schmid describes the abstract author as ‘a construct of the concrete author formed by the concrete reader’.230 In such cases, however, Schmid does not go on to explain whether these constructs of the author involve theories of personality, hypotheses about intentions, or simply products of the imagination.231 Moreover, in addition to such remarks, we also find conflicting descriptions such as the definition quoted earlier, ac-cording to which the abstract author is a ‘reader-hypostatized entity in which all the potential meanings of the work converge’.232

Schmid’s work on epic communication, then, does not tell us ex-actly how the abstract author of a literary text can be reconstructed. This is not surprising given the lack of a consistent definition of the concept, yet there are clearly other, deeper reasons for the neglect of methodological considerations in Schmid’s discussion. His work has introduced and tested many analytic and interpretive categories of use in the critical study of texts; at the same time, however, he seems to have doubts of a distinctly fundamental nature about the degree to which interpretive ascriptions of meaning can be con-trolled.233 A paradigmatic example of this scepticism can be found in the thesis that reconstructing the abstract author of a text pro-duces results that vary from one reception act to the other—Schmid says that

in so far as actual responses will turn out differently from reader to reader and can even vary in a single reader from one reading to the next, a distinct ab-

230 Schmid (2005, 65; our emphasis). ‘Ein vom konkreten Leser gebildetes Kon-strukt des konkreten Autors’ (my translation). On this position, see also Schmid (1996).

231 Willem Weststeijn also points out this lack of clarity in his consideration of Schmid’s model—see Weststeijn (1984) and, in response, Schmid (1986).

232 Schmid (1999, 8). ‘Vom Leser hypostasierte Instanz, in der alle Bedeutungs-potentiale des Werks konvergieren’ (my translation).

233 A different view on this matter is developed in Schmid (1987).


stract author is present not just for every reader but even for every reading act.234

Like Booth, Schmid is concerned with modelling a concept that can draw together a multiplicity of heterogeneous aspects of literary communication processes. And, as in the case of the implied author, so too with the abstract author, this attempt leads to a concept whose definition and usage remain unclear.

2.3.3 Wolfgang Iser’s Implied Reader

Of all the many alternative categories to the implied author, only one concept has become anything near as widespread as the implied author itself. The concept in question is one that at first sight does not appear to be competing with Booth’s concept at all: Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader.235 Nonetheless, with this category, first used in 1972, Iser did more than just add another entry to what was al-ready a long list of reader models with which the academic study of literature had been seeking to approach reception processes since the late 1960s.236 A glance at the formation, definition, and func-tionalization of the concept shows that Iser’s implied reader pre-sents us with an implied author reconceptualized from the perspec-tive of reception theory.237

234 Schmid (2005, 62–63). ‘Insofern Konkretisationen bei verschiedenen Lesern unterschiedlich ausfallen und sogar bei ein und demselben Leser von einer Lektüre zur anderen variieren können, entspricht nicht nur jedem Leser, son-dern sogar jedem Leseakt ein eigener abstrakter Autor’ (my translation).

235 On the diffusion of the concept, see for example Murphy (1995), Richter (1996), Schöttker (1996), and Minkgens (2001).

236 See Wilson (1981) and Rabinowitz (1995). 237 The introduction to the discussion between Iser, Booth, and the reader-

research scholar Norman N. Holland held for the journal Diacritics notes cor-rectly in this respect that ‘Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction has been a central text for Iser, whose … notion of the “implied reader” can be regarded


Like most theories of reception that emerged around 1970, Iser’s model is based on the idea that a convincing concept capturing the meaning of texts can be found only if the reader—or alternatively the reading process itself—is considered. Such views are based on the fact that the way in which individual literary works are taken up and interpreted varies between different times and different people. For this reason, as early as his 1969 inaugural lecture in Constance, published in English as ‘Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction’,238 Iser distanced himself emphatically from a way of dealing with literature which, alluding to Emil Staiger, he calls the ‘Art of Interpretation’:

If it were really true—as the author of a certain well-known essay on ‘the Art of Interpretation’ would have us believe—that the meaning is concealed within a text itself, one cannot help wondering why texts should indulge in such a ‘hide-and-seek’ with their interpreters; and even more puzzling, why the meaning, once it has been found, should then change again, even though the letters, words, and sentences of the text remain the same. … His [the interpreter’s] description of the text is, after all, nothing more than an experience of a cultured reader—in other words, it is only one of the possible realizations of a text. If this is the case, we could then maintain—at least ten-tatively—that meanings in literary texts are mainly generated in the act of reading; they are the product of a rather difficult interaction between text and reader and not qualities hidden in the text, the tracing out of which remains reserved for that traditional kind of interpretation I have described.239

as a development of Booth’s concept of the “implied author”’ (Booth et al. 1980, 57).

238 Iser (1971). The German original is entitled Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Iser 1970).

239 Iser (1971, 4). ‘Wenn es wirklich so wäre, wie uns die “Kunst der Interpreta-tion” glauben machen möchte, daß die Bedeutung im Text selbst verborgen ist, so fragt es sich, warum Texte mit Interpreten solche Versteckspiele ver-anstalten; mehr noch aber, warum sich einmal gefundene Bedeutungen wie-der verändern, obgleich doch Buchstaben, Wörter und Sätze des Textes die-selben bleiben. … Sollte am Ende die Interpretation nichts weiter als ein kul-tiviertes Leseerlebnis und damit nur eine der möglichen Aktualisierungen des Textes sein? Verhält es sich so, dann heißt dies: Bedeutungen literarischer Texte werden überhaupt erst im Lesevorgang generiert; sie sind das Produkt einer Interaktion von Text und Leser und keine im Text versteckten Größen,


Iser’s reflections on the way we deal with literature are based on a concept of the literary text that originates in the thought of the liter-ary theorist Roman Ingarden.240 Of central importance here is the idea that literary works present points of indeterminacy or gaps that prompt the reader to engage in a form of receptive activity that is not necessary when understanding utterances made in the context of pragmatic communication.241 For Iser, there are two reasons why literature is special in this way. First, literary texts are marked by in-determinacy because, as a rule, they do not have a clear communi-cative function: they involve depragmatized speech that can be re-pragmatized in the reading process in very different ways by dif-ferent people at different times. Second, works of literature are rid-dled with gaps because they are concerned not with representing the real world but with generating fictive worlds: since fictive objects are not completely determined (and thus determinable) in the way that real objects are, readers are continually prompted to complete them using their imagination.242

Taking such a concept of literature as his starting point, Iser be-lieves it is possible to explain variation in how literary texts are un-derstood, without giving free rein to arbitrary interpretation in the process. The indeterminacy he describes in literature, he says, does more than just explain why readers understand a text as individuals and can thus potentially understand it in different ways; it also im-poses certain limits on the freedom available to reception processes. For Iser, then, the presence of textual gaps are what ‘enables the text to “communicate”’: ‘we can safely say that the relative inde-

die aufzuspüren allein der Interpretation vorbehalten bleibt’ (Iser 1970, 6–7). On this idea, see most recently Iser (2006, 58–60).

240 Iser’s discussion is particularly indebted to Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art (Ingarden 1931) and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (Ingarden 1936).

241 Iser’s highly problematic concept of the literary text, which he has deter-minedly clung to, despite clear objections, cannot be considered here. On the concept itself, see most recently Iser (1983, 1991); regarding the criticism di-rected at it, see for example Rühling (1996) or Zipfel (2001).

242 See, for example, Iser (1971, 6–10; 1975, 326–28; 1978, 23–27, 53–85). See also, Richter (1996, 523), and Abbott (2002, 83–88).


terminacy and indeterminacy of a text allows a spectrum of actuali-zations. This, however, is not the same as saying that comprehen-sion is arbitrary, for the mixture of determinacy and indeterminacy conditions the interaction between text and reader’.243 The theory that the effect of a literary text is grounded in the gaps in that text lies behind the idea of the appellative structure of literary works that Iser examined in his discussion of indeterminacy in prose fiction.244

Iser first mentions the ‘implied reader’ in relation to this struc-ture in the title of his 1972 collection of pieces in which a series of English novels by authors ranging from John Bunyan to Samuel Beckett are used to investigate the forms and types of ‘readerly par-ticipation worked into the text’.245 Iser thereby introduces the im-plied reader as a suggestive term for the central concept in his the-ory, but he does not progress beyond some very general remarks as far as defining the concept is concerned. We have only a rather per-functory introductory comment on how individual literary texts ar-range the points of indeterminacy by which Iser believes the mean-ing-making acts of recipients are guided:

This active participation is fundamental to the novel; the title of the present collection sums it up with the term ‘implied reader’. This term incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning by the text, and the reader’s actualization of this potential through the reading process. It refers to the ac-tive nature of this process—which will vary historically from one age to an-other—and not to a typology of possible readers.246

243 Iser (1978, 24). ‘Elementare Kommunikationsbedingungen’; ‘So eröffnen zwar die Unbestimmtheitsbeträge der Texte ein gewisses Realisationsspekt-rum, doch dieses bedeutet nicht Willkür des Erfassens, sondern verkörpert die zentrale Bedingung der Interaktion von Text und Leser’ (Iser 1976, 45).

244 Iser (1971)—note the title of the German original, Die Appellstruktur der Texte (Iser 1970).

245 Iser (1968, 285). ‘In den Text einkomponierten Mitarbeit des Lesers’ (my translation). An English version of the 1972 collection (Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett; Iser 1972) was published in 1974 as The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Iser 1974).

246 Iser (1974, xii). ‘Dieser Akt bildet eine Grundstruktur des Romans. Sie ist durch den Titel der Aufsatzsammlung als die des impliziten Lesers bezeich-


Iser sets out a more detailed picture of how he believes literary works affect us and thus of what he means by the implied reader in The Act of Reading, his 1978 study of the phenomenology of recep-tion.247 Picking up his ideas on the indeterminacy of literature, he here defines the implied reader as a reader-role that is suggested by literary works and results from the coexistence of textual perspec-tives and the necessity of integrating them in the course of recep-tion:

It has been pointed out that the literary text offers a perspective view of the world (namely, the author’s). It is also, in itself, composed of a variety of per-spectives that outline the author’s view and also provide access to what the reader is meant to visualize. This is best exemplified by the novel, which is a system of perspectives designed to transmit the individuality of the author’s vision. As a rule there are four main perspectives: those of the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the fictitious reader. Although these may differ in or-der of importance, none of them on its own is identical to the meaning of the text. What they do is provide guidelines originating from different starting points (narrator, characters, etc.), continually shading into each other and de-vised in such a way that they all converge on a general meeting place. We call this meeting place the meaning of the text, which can only be brought into fo-cus if it is visualized from a standpoint. Thus standpoint and convergence of textual perspectives are closely interrelated, although neither of them is actu-ally represented in the text, let alone set out in words. Rather they emerge during the reading process, in the course of which the reader’s role is to oc-cupy shifting vantage points that are geared to a prestructured activity and to fit the diverse perspectives into a gradually evolving pattern.248

net. Damit ist zweierlei gesagt: 1. Die Struktur kann und wird historisch im-mer unterschiedlich besetzt sein. 2. Der implizite Leser meint den im Text vorgezeichneten Aktcharakter des Lesens und nicht eine Typologie mögli-cher Leser’ (Iser 1972, 8–9).

247 Iser (1978). The German original, Der Akt des Lesens, was published in 1976 (Iser 1976).

248 Iser (1978, 35). ‘Nun ist der literarische Text nicht nur eine perspektische Hinsicht des Autors auf die Welt, er ist selbst ein perspektivisches Gebilde, durch das sowohl die Bestimmtheit dieser Hinsicht als auch die Möglichkeit, sie zu gewärtigen, entsteht. Dieser Sachverhalt läßt sich am Roman paradig-matisch veranschaulichen. Er besitzt eine perspektivische Anlage, die aus mehreren deutlich voneinander abhebbaren Perspektivträgern besteht, die durch den Erzähler, die Figuren, die Handlung (plot) sowie die Leserfiktion


Because he assumes that this textual structure and the structure of the act it induces provide the basis for all receptions of a work, Iser also describes his concept of the implied reader as a ‘transcendental model’.249 However different the interpretations of a literary work may turn out to be depending on the preconceptions, individual situations, and habitual dispositions of its readers, Iser feels, the same single underlying role offered to the recipient by the text is actualized in each case.

The various references to Booth and his Rhetoric of Fiction in Iser’s work show that Iser sees the concept of the implied reader as a nec-essary reception-based counterpart to the implied author.250 Most discussion of the implied reader has accepted this view and under-stood the concept as a correlate to Booth’s category in communica-tion theory.251 Such a perspective may respect Iser’s reasons for introducing the concept, but it does not adequately reflect the sys-tematic relationship between the implied author and the implied reader. As we have shown, both concepts are generally treated as constructs that stand for the text in its entirety; consequently, both the implied author and the implied reader are not infrequently cred-ited with the potential to allow divergent interpretations of literary works to be evaluated.252 The fact that the two concepts have paral-

gesetzt sind. Bei aller hierarchischen Abstufung, die zwischen den Textper-spektiven herrschen mag, ist doch keine von ihnen ausschließlich mit dem Sinn des Textes identisch. Vielmehr markieren sie in der Regel unterschiedli-che Orientierungszentren im Text, die es aufeinander zu beziehen gilt, damit der ihnen gemeinsame Verweisungszusammenhang konkret zu werden ver-mag. Insoweit ist dem Leser eine bestimmte Textstruktur vorgegeben, die ihn nötigt, einen Blickpunkt einzunehmen, der die Integration der Textperspekti-ven herzustellen erlaubt’ (Iser 1976, 61–62).

249 Iser (1978, 38). ‘Transzendentales Modell’ (Iser 1976, 66). In the conversa-tion with Booth and Holland mentioned above, Iser remarks in this sense that his model allows the ‘assessment and evaluation of actual readers’ responses to a literary text’ (Booth et al. 1980, 61).

250 See, for example, Iser (1974, 111–13; 1978, 36–37). 251 See, for example, Chatman (1978, 151). 252 See 1.2.3 above.


lel functions rather than complementing each other can also be seen from the way they are used in interpretive practice, in which one or the other is usually employed but rarely both together.253 In short, the implied author and the implied reader would seem to present us with competing rather than complemental concepts, to be two different ways of modelling the basic meaning of texts.254

Not only are the expectations associated with the implied reader the same as those attached to the implied author; Iser’s ideas on the appellative structure of literary texts also show similar weaknesses to those in Booth’s treatment of the central concept of the Rhetoricof Fiction. In both cases, there is a lack of conceptual clarity and an insufficiently precise consideration of how the concept in question can be applied in practice.255

Iser considers the status and function of the implied reader in considerable detail, but his treatment of its definition is glaringly nondescript in comparison, being almost entirely restricted to ex ne-gativo characterizations of the concept. Iser is primarily concerned with rebutting two understandings of the implied reader that have surfaced again and again in the intense discussion surrounding the concept: the suggestion that it be explicated as a component of an intentionalistic theory of interpretation on the one hand,256 and at-tempts to characterize it with reference to the programme of histori-cal semantics on the other.257 Iser clearly treats both approaches as misguided; he has not, however, in his many responses to the ques-tions, objections, and suggestions of his critics explained exactly what he does mean by the implied reader and the idea that it is the transcendental precondition of a text’s reception. A not insignificant

253 Consider, for example, the textual analyses in Booth (1961) or Iser (1974). 254 See also Nünning (1993, 8–9). 255 See 1.2.3 above. 256 See for example Link (1973), Gumbrecht (1975), or Groeben (1982), and

Iser’s hostility to it in Iser (1975, 334–35). See also the critical commentary on the concept of the ‘intended reader’ (Wolff 1971) in Iser’s The Act of Reading (Iser 1978).

257 See most recently Vollhardt (2003); Iser’s opposition to it is set out in Iser (1978, 28–30).


reason for this may well be the fact that he gives his concept, and with it his phenomenology of reception, the same special position between the description and interpretation of texts as that so often associated with the implied author.258

As well failing to clarify the definition of the implied reader, Iser’s work in this area also fails to explain the methodology to be used when identifying it in practice. He repeatedly and explicitly distances his approach, one of literary theory, from empirical stud-ies of reading, but nowhere in his work does he specify what rules should be followed or what requirements have to be satisfied when determining the implied reader of a work. This makes it much harder to put the concept and the far-reaching claims that accom-pany it to the test in practice. Consequently, the way in which Iser deals with texts frequently comes across as no less subjective and esoteric than the ‘Art of Interpretation’ from which he hopes to es-cape by studying the relationship between textual structures and acts of reception.259

2.3.4 The Apparent Artist, the Fictional Author, and the Postulated Author

The implied author concept has, as we have seen, prompted a wide range of conceptual innovations in debates on the analysis of liter-ary texts in the context of structuralism, literary rhetoric, and recep-tion theory. The key concept of The Rhetoric of Fiction has also given rise to a variety of author models in the context of more gen-eral discussions about aesthetics and literary theory. Like the alter-native categories we have considered so far, the creation of these models has been inspired by the concept of the implied author, but

258 This is particularly clear in the controversy between Iser und Stanley Fish (see Booth et al. 1980, Fish 1981, Iser 1981, Bérube 2004). See also 2.2 and 2.3.1 above.

259 See, for example, Iser (1984, iii).


there are also certain features that place them in a group of their own. More precisely, most author concepts put forward in response to Booth’s implied author in the context of, say, aesthetics, inter-pretation theory, and fictionality theory differ both in their presen-tation and in what they claim to achieve from categories such as the Model Author, the abstract author, and the implied reader. However much they may differ in detail, the group of author concepts with which we are here concerned all have in common the fact that they do not aim to replace Booth’s concept in all its meanings. Rather, they are modelled on the assumption that by explicating certain components of the implied author, we can develop concepts that allow us to describe certain individual aspects of the meaning and interpretation of literary texts. This difference in the aim behind the concepts is, as a rule, also reflected in their presentation: the author models developed in the context of aesthetics and literary theory are generally defined more clearly and applied in a more perspicuous way than the alternative categories that originate in the context of structuralism, rhetoric, and reception theory.260

These general points cannot be explored in further detail here; however, we hope to illustrate them in the following brief consid-eration of three well-known concepts that have emerged from this kind of response to Booth’s implied author. Our examples here are Kendall Walton’s apparent artist, Gregory Currie’s fictional author, and Alexander Nehamas’s postulated author.261

Kendall Walton introduced the concept of the apparent artist in the context of his attempt to explicate the category of style, as popu-lar in aesthetics and the disciplines of cultural studies as it is vague.262 Setting himself apart from the long-standard position, Walton suggests that the style of artistic artefacts can be determined convincingly only if their making or the fact of their being made is

260 See part 2 below on the possibility of a comprehensive explication of Booth’s concept.

261 On these concepts, see also the reconstructions and critical commentaries in Stecker (1987, 1997).

262 See Walton (1976, 1979, 1990). Walton sometimes refers to an apparent au-thor as well (see, for example, Walton 1976, 61).


taken into consideration. The style of a work of art, he writes, can be properly grasped only ‘in terms of the notion of the manner in which it was made’.263 By saying this, however, Walton does not mean that stylistic studies should investigate the actual origins of paintings, installations, or novels. Instead, he wants stylistic re-search to examine the impression that artefacts give of how they came about. As early as his 1976 essay ‘Points of View in Narrative and Depictive Representation’, he writes in this respect:

A work may or may not actually have been produced in a manner or by the sort of person it seems to have been. I am interested not in how reliable the impressions works give of their origin are, but in the impressions themselves … . We can describe how a work seems to have come about by saying that its ‘apparent artist’ splattered paint on the canvas, or intended it to be funny, or was a buffoon, or whatever.264

Walton, in other words, uses the category of the apparent artist to refer to an entity responsible for the impression that the features of an artefact give about the way in which it was brought into being. In doing so, unlike many advocates of the implied author and related author concepts, he is well aware that the process of determining the style and thus the apparent artist of a work of art is by no means a self-explanatory one undeserving of further attention.265 The arte-fact itself, he says, is indeed the central point of reference, but it is not the only basis on which the attributions that allow the apparent artist to be identified are made. He notes that ‘how things look or sound or seem is conditioned by what we know or believe, and hence the experiences that formed our beliefs’.266 Despite this in-sight, however, Walton does not consider in detail the question of what information recipients should draw on when engaging with

263 Walton (1979, 80). On this idea, see also the treatment of the concept of style in Robinson (1984, 1985), who, however, does draw on the implied author concept.

264 Walton (1976, 51; italics in original). See also Walton (1979, 84; 1990, 370). 265 ‘I have pretended so far that what it is for something to appear to have been

made in a certain manner is unproblematic. But nothing is further from the truth’ (Walton 1979, 88).

266 Walton (1979, 90).


works of art. He is sceptical towards the idea that perfect analysis of the meaning or even the style of artistic artefacts is possible at all; thus, when commenting on the actual reconstruction of apparent artists in practice, he is content to note simply that reception of a work of art should be oriented around general cultural knowledge of the time in which it originated.267

The idea of a fictional author as distinct from the fictive narrator and real author of epic texts lies at the centre of Gregory Currie’s position regarding the truth in fiction problem in his 1990 mono-graph The Nature of Fiction.268 Currie’s contribution to the debate here is based on the idea that forming a picture of the world of a fictional text can be understood to mean reconstructing the beliefs of a mediating agent, assumed to be reliable, who communicates the states and events described in the text. Currie uses the term ‘fic-tional author’ to refer to this mediating entity that takes shape in the process of reading fictional texts:

The fictional author (as I shall call him) is that fictional character constructed within our make-believe whom we take to be telling us the story as known fact. Our reading is thus an exploration of the fictional author’s belief struc-ture. … The belief set of the fictional author … is the set of propositions that go to make up the story. This set of propositions is not literally true, although it is, as we say, true in fiction. Interpreting real people is a matter of building up a picture of their belief set. So, too, with the fictional author.269

Currie also appreciates that texts do not unambiguously direct the reconstruction of their fictional authors:

When it comes to interpreting the beliefs of the fictional author, the text will be one of the things that gives us clues as to what kind of person he is … . But

267 See Walton (1979, 91, 101). 268 See Currie (1990, 52–98). On the issues involved here, and for pointers to the

most important positions adopted on them, see most recently Livingston (2005c).

269 Currie (1990, 76; italics in original). Despite introducing the fictional author, Currie has repeatedly come out in favour of using the implied author (see, for example, Currie 1993, 1995, 2003). On the concept of the fictional author, see also Davies (1996).


the text provides these clues only against a background of assumptions for which there might be no warrant in the text itself.270

In order to prevent different fictional authors being found for a sin-gle text by different readers with different individual prior assump-tions, Currie includes a crucial restriction in his remarks on the con-cept: the fictional author of a work is the subject possessing the be-lief system that an informed contemporary recipient would have sensibly believed to be held by a credible mediating entity commu-nicating the world of the text.271

Whereas the concepts of Walton and Currie are intended to ex-plain specific aspects of how we deal with works of art, that put forward by Alexander Nehamas is so extensive in scope that it is essentially very similar to Booth’s implied author. Nehamas intro-duced the postulated author as part of an attempt to combine two views originally adopted in very different contexts in literary the-ory. On the one hand, he draws on Michel Foucault’s famous piece ‘What Is an Author?’. Above all, the key point for Nehamas here is the idea that an author should be understood as ‘a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the ex-clusions that we practice’.272 On the other hand, Nehamas’s work on the author concept also makes use of an approach to the content of literary texts outlined in William Tolhurst’s important essay ‘On What a Text Is and How It Means’. Here, Nehamas takes up the idea that the meaning of a work consists of the intentions that a well-informed representative of the intended group of readers would be most justified to ascribe to the writer of the text.273 Developing these ideas of Foucault and Tolhurst, Nehamas characterizes the concept of the postulated author—referred to as the author for rea-sons of simplicity—as follows in his 1981 essay ‘The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Idea’:

270 Currie (1990, 77). 271 Currie (1990, 100). 272 Foucault (1969, 180); see Nehamas (1987, 270–72). 273 See Tolhurst (1979). See also chapter 3 below.


… as the author is not identical with a text’s fictional narrator, so he is also di-stinct from its historical writer. The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’s features; he is a character, a hypothesis which is accepted provisionally, guides interpretation, and is in turn modified in its light. The author, unlike the writer, is not a text’s efficient cause but, so to speak, its formal cause, manifested in though not identical with it.274

On the basis of this description, it is tempting to conclude that the postulated author is simply the implied author under a different name. A closer examination of the way Nehamas treats the concept, however, soon shows that this is not the case. First, his postulated author is clearly distinguished from the implied author by the fact that it is defined as an author-construct formed by the reader of a text. The contrast between the implied author and the postulated author is made clear when Nehamas writes that the postulated au-thor is not to be understood as at once ‘the product of the text and the creation of the writer’,275 thus openly excluding from his defini-tion one of the central precepts of Booth’s concept. Second, there is a clear methodological difference between Nehamas’s treatment of the postulated author and most appraisals of the implied author. After introducing his concept, Nehamas adds the following remark:

A methodological constraint on this view is that the postulated author be his-torically plausible; the principle is that the text does not mean what its writer could not, historically, have meant by it. … What a writer could mean can be determined by linguistic or biographical considerations but also by facts about the history of literature and the world, psychology, anthropology, and much else besides.276

Having looked briefly at the suggestions of Walton, Currie, and Nehamas regarding the partial clarification of Booth’s concept, we shall now outline a more comprehensive explication of the implied author in the second part of this book.

274 Nehamas (1981, 145). See also Nehamas (1986, 688–89). 275 Nehamas (1987, 273). 276 Nehamas (1981, 145). Nehamas later adopts a more extreme and somewhat

puzzling version of this view: ‘The author … is a plausible historical variant of the writer, a character the writer could have been, someone who means what the writer could have meant, but never, in any sense, did mean’, Ne-hamas (1986, 689; our emphasis).

Part Two

Explicating the Concept

3 Exit IA?

Possibilities for Explicating the Implied Author

We have now considered in some detail the ways in which the im-plied author has been defined and used during the past four decades; in the following pages, we turn to the question of how it should be treated in future. In the process, we shall be guided not, as previ-ously, by the main contexts in which the concept has been received but rather by the dominant types and subtypes among the ways of modelling it that have been put forward. Three competing sugges-tions are involved here, according to which Booth’s concept should be defined either as a pragmatic category, as a semantic category, or as a category of reception psychology. Our study will focus on pro-posals that suggest seeing the implied author in pragmatic or se-mantic terms, as a participant in communication or a subject identi-fied as source of meaning respectively. The discussion of these ap-proaches to modelling the concept begins by looking at how they can be conceptually and methodologically fleshed out, and then considering whether they represent, or at least provide the basis for, a clarification of Booth’s concept itself.

Bearing in mind the reconstructions of the concept’s use set out above, it should come as little surprise to learn that our discussion will not provide a straight yes-or-no answer to ‘Exit IA?’, the ques-tion inspired by Gérard Genette and posed in the title to this chap-ter.1 If there is anything to be learnt from the stories of concepts such as those we are dealing with here, it lies in the insight that cer-tain prominent concepts in cultural studies are used not because of their suitability but rather in spite of their unsuitability—because, that is, they make it possible to articulate certain beliefs and inten-tions that are clearly deeply rooted in the scholarly community. One

1 See Genette (1988, 140–48). See also 2.2.3 above.

Possibilities for Explicating the Implied Author 152

suspects this is why the implied author concept has proved resistant to all demonstrations of terminological inadequacy and attempts to do away with it up to the present point in time, and why it will in all likelihood continue to do so until less problematic formulations are found for the beliefs and intentions behind it.

As our analysis of the concept’s history has shown, making useof the implied author reflects a wide range of intuitions which are perfectly plausible when considered separately but which conflict with one another when combined together in a single concept. Sup-port for many of these ideas is equally widespread; thus, becausethere is no single idea that is clearly favoured above the rest, an ex-plication that suggests focusing on one particular component of the concept’s meaning is unlikely to have much chance of being widely accepted. When dealing with concepts such as the implied author, it is more practical to clarify them by identifying different key aspects and then explicating the latter separately from one another.2 For thisreason, the analysis and discussion of the implied author presented in this book will not end with any one proposal for abandoning, replacing, or redefining the concept. Instead, we shall draw our re-flections to a close with a series of conceptual, methodological, and terminological suggestions that we hope will overcome the anoma-lies of the implied author yet still take suitable theoretical account of the various ideas bound up with Booth’s concept.

3.1 The Implied Author as a Phenomenon of Reception

When, in the coming pages, we consider the most important ways of modelling the implied author that have been put forward, we shall not give detailed consideration to the thesis that the concept is,or should be, an aid to the description of empirical reception pro-

2 On this approach, see Kindt and Müller (1999, 286–87), Müller (2000, 145–48), and Kindt (2004, 59–60).

Exit IA? 153

cesses. Although this theory is rarely expressed explicitly as such in the various strands of the debate, it has nonetheless played a not in-significant role in uptake of the concept. A number of positive and negative responses to the implied author, that is to say, are clearly based on the assumption that use of the concept brings with it the claim of being able to account for actual reading processes. A corre-sponding understanding of the implied author can be found in someof Booth’s own remarks,3 and it is also encountered in many contri-butions to the controversy surrounding the concept in the context of interpretation theory.4

We shall not explore this thesis in detail for the following reason:the question of whether the implied author can be used as a category of empirical reception cannot be discussed meaningfully in the con-text of a work such as the present one in which a traditional ap-proach to the study of texts is taken. Only in the context of empiri-cal studies is it possible to test properly whether or not recipientscreate images of the writers of texts and whether the results of read-ing processes have anything in common with what is normally un-derstood by the term ‘implied author’. To date, no more than the first steps have been taken on the way to providing adequate an-swers to such questions. As Ursula Christmann and Margrit Schrei-er highlight in their comprehensive overview of recent work on text reception in cognitive psychology, the significance of inference pro-cesses in the reading and understanding of literature has hardly been studied at all to date; they add that ‘this is particularly true regar-ding inferences about textual meanings and authorial intentions’.5

3 The classic statement of this understanding of the concept is Booth’s asser-tion in The Rhetoric of Fiction that ‘however impersonal [the author] may tryto be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe whowrites in this manner’.

4 See 2.1 above.5 Christmann and Schreier (2003, 267). ‘Dies gilt insbesondere für die Inferenz

von Textdeutungen und Autorintentionen’ (my translation). On this issue, see also the remarks in McKoon and Ratcliff (1992), and Maglioni et al. (1996).Nünning (1993, 11) noted that ‘with the assumption that readers construct an image of the author’ (‘bei der Annahme, daß sich Leser während der Lektüreein Bild vom Autor konstruieren’) we are given a ‘hypothesis that is intui-


Thus, when contributions to the discussion align themselves in sup-port of or opposition to Booth’s concept by referring to the course taken by concrete reception processes, we are concerned with a stance based solely on the experiences that the critic or theorist inquestion has or had when reading literary texts. Genette, for ex-ample, introduces his treatment of the implied author in NarrativeDiscourse Revisited by remarking that the concept makes sense to him when understood in the sense of an author-image created by the reader in the process of reception:

It seems to me to correspond to my experience of reading. I read, for example,Joseph and His Brothers; I hear in the text a voice, the voice of the fictivenarrator; something (?) tells me that that voice is not Thomas Mann’s; and be-hind the explicit image of that artless and devout narrator I construct as wellas I can—and if possible without taking advantage of too many extratextualpieces of information—the image (implied by that fiction) of the author,whom I suppose a contrario to be clear-head and a ‘free thinker’.6

Work that treats the implied author as a concept of empirical recep-tion, then, ignores the lack of reliable empirical studies that would make such an understanding credible. This approach also appears to overlook the fact that it is anything but clear what the implicationsof such studies would be for the way critics and theorists work with literary texts. It is plausible enough that the way in which reception processes unfold in reality could and should be taken as a guideline for developing methods and concepts to be used in the study of texts. This does not, however, tell us how they should be modelled in detail. In other words, it is perfectly conceivable that the dis-course of literary theory could come to see the implied author as

tively plausible but as yet empirically untested’ (‘eine zwar intuitiv plausible,empirisch bislang aber nicht überprüfte Hypothese’; my translations). Onthis, see also Heinen (2002, 334–36).

6 Genette (1988, 141). ‘Elle me semble correspondre à mon expérience de lec-ture: je lis, par exemple, Joseph et ses frères, j’y entends un voix, celle dunarrateur fictif, quelque chose (?) me dit que cette voix n’est pas celle de Thomas Mann, et je construis tant bien que mal, et si possible sans exploitertrop d’indications extratextuelles, derrière l’image explicite de ce narrateurnaïf et dévot, l’image, impliquée par cette fiction, de son auteur, que je sup-pose a contrario lucide et “libre penseur”’ (Genette 1983, 97).

Exit IA? 155

superfluous even if experiments in cognitive psychology were to show that readers of a text do form an image of its author in most or even all cases. Conversely, it is also conceivable that Booth’s con-cept could be retained in the academic study of literature even if empirical studies were to demonstrate that author-images are notformed in the process of reading literary texts.

3.2 The Implied Author as a Participant in Communication

The first interpretation of the concept that we will consider in greater depth is the idea that the implied author should be under-stood as a sender in the process of literary communication.7 Accor-ding to this view, the concept stands for one of the various kinds of speaking entities that should be fundamentally distinguished from one another in fictional texts. Supporters of such an interpretation of the concept understand literary works as mediation processes with several levels of sender and receiver embedded in one another; the implied author is placed between the author and the narrator or characters in this hierarchy of speakers.8 A corresponding under-standing of Booth’s concept presents itself in any treatment of the implied author that accredits it with a voice. It also underlies mostattempts to model literary texts in terms of communication theory with the help of the implied author.9

7 On the forms and representatives of this position, see 2.2.2 above.8 For the sake of simplicity, we shall concentrate on the narrator rather on other

fictive speakers in what follows; nonetheless, it is perfectly possible to applythe relevant findings to the speech of characters as well.

9 Not infrequently, however, it is simply a figure of speech or the equivalentthat is involved when the implied author is accredited with a voice or workedinto a model of communication. See the details in 2.2 and 2.3 above.


There is a widely held belief among supporters of the implied author category that Booth’s concept must be brought into the de-scription of literary communication because works have some fea-tures that can be attributed neither to their authors, nor to their nar-rators, nor to their characters. This view provides the background to the proposal that the implied author be understood as a hierarchi-cally superordinate text-internal sender in the communication proc-ess. The underlying idea here is that the communicative tasks in literature are shared between several parties; William Nelles hasexpressed it well when he says that ‘the historical author writes …; the implied author means …; the narrator speaks’.10 The reasoning of those who advocate pragmatic models of the implied author then proceeds as follows: the picture of literary communication just de-scribed makes clear that the implied author, the empirical author, and the fictive narrator of a work are categorially related to one an-other; as this is so, and given that the author and the narrator of atext should obviously be categorized as speakers, the implied author of the text can also be seen as one.11

It is not hard to see that this argument, and with it the idea that the implied author be modelled as one of several voices in literarytexts, is problematic. As we have seen, the pragmatic understanding of the concept rests on the thesis that the implied author, the author,and the narrator are categorially related to one another. Only against the background of such a thesis does the assumption that the im-plied author is a participant in literary communication suggest thatthis participation could have a certain specific nature. A closeranalysis of the three entities in question, however, soon shows that there are fundamental differences between the author and narrator on the one hand and the implied author on the other. Even if it is established that the three entities resemble one another in that as-pects of literary communication can be attributed to them, it is im-portant to note that the attribution operations involved are not all of

10 Nelles (1993, 22).11 This kind of argument by analogy lies behind probably the most well-known

proposal that the implied author be understood as a sender in a communica-tion process, that in Bronzwaer (1978, 1981).

Exit IA? 157

the same type. In the case of attributions involving the author and the narrator, we are dealing with the assumption of causal relations:the text is brought forth by the author, and the narrative report is brought forth by the narrator. The author and narrator, that is to say, are to be understood as sources of utterances. In the case of attribu-tions involving the implied author, however, we are dealing with theassumption of a semantic relation. Strictly speaking, we cannot say that the implied author brings forth anything. It should be seen not as the source of an utterance but as a placeholder for its meaning. And this means that the assumed or actual causal link to an utter-ance that allows the author and narrator to be referred to as senders or speakers is not present in the case of the implied author. The real status of the idea that the implied author be understood as a partici-pant in communication is revealed in Genette’s comment that ‘a narrative of fiction is produced fictively by its narrator and actuallyby its (real) author’.12

Comments of this kind do not cast doubt on the assumption that the implied author has a function in literary communication; they simply suggest it is erroneous to use the role of the author or thenarrator in the relevant processes as a model for understanding that of the implied author. Correspondingly, the arguments with which we are here concerned usually lead to redefinition of the implied au-thor rather than rejection of it. The arguments involved have helped to establish the view that Booth’s concept can be described as a par-ticipant in communication only in a metaphorical sense, not a literal one, and thus that it should be understood as a semantic concept rather than a pragmatic one.13 Michael J. Toolan takes such a posi-tion when he writes that ‘the implied author is a real position in

12 Genette (1988, 139). ‘Un récit de fiction est fictivement produit par son nar-rateur, et effectivement par son auteur (réel); entre eux, personne ne travaille’(Genette 1983, 96).

13 The remarks of Rimmon-Kenan (1983, 86–88) in Narrative Fiction have un-doubtedly helped to encourage this view.


narrative processing …, but it is not a real role in narrative trans-mission’.14

3.3 The Implied Author as a Postulated Subject Behind the Text

The quotation from Toolan at the end of the last section expresses the view that the implied author should be understood as a postu-lated subject to which aspects of the text are attributed rather than a sender in the communication process. This standpoint has become awidespread consensus in discussions of the concept over the years,15

but the debate is still far from reaching agreement about exactly how the concept should be modelled. The fact is that treating the implied author as a subject in this way is theoretically compatiblewith a wide range of divergent positions, and is also a strategyadopted in several markedly heterogeneous forms in practice. Our discussion of this approach and its contribution to the explication of the implied author must therefore begin by distinguishing between the basic ways in which Booth’s concept can be understood as an entity to which some aspect of a text is ascribed. In making these distinctions, we shall be guided by the question of how the object and process of ascription can be determined in detail.

Before we turn to the variants of the position in question, though, we should point out that choosing to model the concept in this man-ner also points towards a certain way of responding to it. Even if treatments of the implied author as a postulated subject to whichsome aspect of the text is ascribed can differ considerably from one another, the text-based reconstructions that they attribute to the con-

14 Toolan (1988, 78; emphasis in original). See 2.2.2 above on other positionsof this kind.

15 See 2.2.2 above on this position, its variants, and its supporters.

Exit IA? 159

cept have something fundamental in common: the object of the at-tribution operation with which the implied author of a text is con-structed is always an idea of ‘work meaning’.16 In the context of thedominant ways of modelling the concept, in other words, the im-plied author is a placeholder for what Booth once referred to as ‘the intuitive apprehension of the completed artistic whole’.17 This opens the possibility of using a mentalistic vocabulary to speak about texts, their construction, and their content.18 Understanding the implied author in this way means that identifying it can be (assome descriptively oriented critics fail to see)19 a less complex un-dertaking than providing a comprehensive interpretation of a text but will also always (as overlooked by many supporters concernedwith interpretation in practice)20 be clearly more complex than sim-ply describing individual elements and structures in the text.21 Areconstruction of the implied author can be prompted, prepared for, and made plausible by identifying and describing textual structures, but this does not mean that it follows directly from the description of a work. Instead, it assumes that a concept of work meaning and a means of determining it have been chosen in a reasoned manner.22

Thus, understanding Booth’s concept as a subject to which aspects of the text can be attributed compels us to abandon the very idea that makes the concept so popular with respect to interpretation in practice, the idea that the implied author forms a natural bridge, so

16 On this concept, see Stecker (1997, 173–85).17 ‘Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings

but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and sufferingof all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of thecompleted artistic whole’ (Booth 1961, 73–74).

18 See especially Booth et al. (1980, 66).19 For example, Bal (1981b, 209).20 For example, Darby (2001, 838).21 On the concept of integrative interpretation, see most recently Krausz (2002).

On positions concerned with description on the one hand and interpretation inpractice on the other, see 2.2 above.

22 On this and other requirements that must be met by interpretive reconstruc-tions, see Danneberg and Müller (1984a, 1984b), Danneberg (1999), Strube(2000), and Kindt and Müller (2003b, 2003d).


to speak, between the description and interpretation of literarytexts.23

As far as the implied author debate is concerned, the ideas dis-cussed here suggest that the concept should in future be considered in a context in which it has not previously been viewed. Somethingdefined as the basic meaning of a text cannot be meaningfully dis-cussed in the context of deliberations about the form that the analy-sis of narrative texts, dramas, or lyric poetry should take. If we wish to examine and evaluate the attempts to model and explicate theconcept as an entity to which aspects of textual meaning are as-cribed, we can do so appropriately only if we examine them in the context of discussions that put forward and compare competingconcepts of work meaning and divergent methods for determiningit. We must therefore turn our attention to the debates of interpreta-tion theory and literary theory.24

Having pointed out this aspect of the background to the follow-ing pages, we shall now present and examine the basic possibilitiesfor characterizing and explicating the implied author concept as a subject to which aspects of the text are ascribed. Our classification of these possibilities will be guided by the conceptual orientationand methodological profile of the positions concerned.25 In the pro-cess, we shall find that contributions to the discussion do not always belong to the group of explication attempts that their self-presen-tation would suggest.26 We can begin by distinguishing two basic types of definition for the concept on the basis of conceptual orien-tation. On the one hand, it can be suggested that the implied author be explicated as a part of a non-intentionalistic approach to textual interpretation; on the other, it can be proposed that Booth’s concept be clarified as part of an intentionalistic approach to textual inter-

23 See 2.2.2 above. 24 Genette reaches the same conclusion in Narrative Discourse Revisited, albeit

from a different direction. He points out that the concept falls in the domainof poetics rather than in that of narratology (Genette 1988, 137).

25 On the concepts of conceptual orientation and methodological profile, see Kindt and Müller (2005, 367–69).

26 See 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 below.

Exit IA? 161

pretation. These two fundamentally different types of explication for the concept focus respectively on one or the other of the con-flicting interpretive objectives that Booth tried to combine in it.27

Taking up a remark by Michael J. Toolan, the two kinds of defi-nition can be analysed as different ways of interpreting the expres-sion ‘implied author’. For those who support a non-intentionalistic explication, the essence of the concept lies in the adjective ‘im-plied’; for those who support an intentionalistic explication, it lies in the noun ‘author’.28 Considering work on the implied author in terms of its methodological profile then suggests that each of the two basic kinds of elucidation can be realized in one of two ways. Explanation of the concept from a non-intentionalistic perspective results in either a pragmatistic or a conventionalistic understanding of the implied author; explanation from an intentionalistic point of view always boils down to a proposal that can be said to follow ei-ther the path of hypothetical intentionalism on the one hand or that of actual intentionalism on the other.29 The resultant possibilities are summarized in figure 5.

Fig. 5. The implied author as a postulated subject behind the text

27 See 1.2 above.28 Toolan (1988, 77–78) writes that ‘in subsequent discussions of the implied

author, the emphasis has tended to be on the word implied; in Booth the em-phasis seems to me to be far more on the word author’ (italics in original).

29 See Levinson (1992) and Stecker (1997) for comparable distinctions betweencompeting ways of reconstructing work meaning.


3.1.1 Modelling and Explicating the Concept in the Context of a Non-Intentionalistic Theory of Interpretation

The vast majority of proposals for clarifying the implied author con-cept to date see themselves, some rightly, some wrongly, as contri-butions to a programme of non-intentionalistic interpretation. Advo-cates of such an explication see the concept as standing in the anti-intentionalistic tradition of twentieth-century literary theory. The concept of the implied author, they believe, should be understood as a reaction to an insight originating in the famous essay ‘The Inten-tional Fallacy’ by Monroe C. Beardsley and William K. Wimsattand summarized as follows by Seymour Chatman in his book Com-ing to Terms: ‘Authors sometimes mean one thing but their texts another.’30 Taking this thesis as their starting point, non-intentio-nalistic explanations of the implied author always end up proposing that Booth’s concept be seen as emerging from a form of literaryanalysis that asks not what an author wanted to say but only what his text means. Those who advocate modelling the concept in this way, however, are less agreed as to the exact objective that this kindof analysis should have and what should be aimed for when iden-tifying the implied author as part of it. The various non-intention-alistic suggestions for clarifying Booth’s concept, that is to say, can be assigned to one of two classes according to whether they see work meaning in terms of pragmatism or conventionalism.

(1) Supporters of the pragmatism-based variant of this approach to modelling the implied author believe that the content of a text lies in the meanings that can be attributed to it.31 In this context, theresults of study of a text have only to meet the following two re-quirements in order to provide us with its work meaning and thus its implied author: they must be free of internal contradiction and must

30 Chatman (1990a, 78).31 On the concept of pragmatism in interpretation theory that underlies the name

for this approach to modelling the implied author, see especially Rorty(1985a, 1985b, 1989, 1992), Shusterman (1992) and Stecker (1997, 213–44).When working with texts, pragmatists are concerned with what Levinson(1996a, 177) has described as the ‘ludic meaning’ of a work.

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be essentially appropriate to the text.32 An example of such a posi-tion can be seen when Joseph Ewen remarks that ‘whenever a reader manages to give (or to discover) a consistent meaning to a work it should be attributed to the “implied author”’.33

Such a view of the implied author may well lie behind some of the ways in which the concept has been employed, but it covers only a small part of the full range of uses to which the concept has been put and thus cannot be taken as a representative explication ofit. Above all, the pragmatism-based approach to modelling the con-cept is inadequate because it takes no account of two ideas that ac-company the vast majority of ways in which the implied author hasbeen used and can thus be seen as key features that would have to be accounted for in any explication of the concept. Supporters of the pragmatism-based approach to defining the implied author overlook the fact that it is as a rule understood as a historical concept, and they also fail to consider the fact that it is generally seen as a cate-gory that can be reconstructed uniquely and unambiguously.34

The case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is much-discussed in argu-ments about interpretation theory and provides a good illustration of these two points. It is certainly conceivable that an interpretationaccording to which the play represents Oedipal conflicts could be formulated in such a way that the requirements of internal consis-tency and basic textual adequacy were fulfilled. Nonetheless, it doesnot seem appropriate to say that such an interpretation provides us

32 See Strube (2000, 67) on the requirement of being essentially appropriate tothe text.

33 Ewen (1974, ix).34 This latter impression is based on the assumption that one and only one im-

plied author, or none, can be associated with any text (see Booth 2002).Unlike the widespread understanding of the implied author as a historicalconcept, this aspect is rarely considered explicitly (but see Nünning 1993,16–17). The idea that the implied author should be treated as a singular con-cept has sometimes been doubted in recent years. Nelles (1993, 26), for ex-ample, says that ‘a work may in certain unusual cases have more than oneimplied author’. Explications of the concept that adopt such a view, ofcourse, amount to abandoning the implied author entirely (see our remarks onPreston 1997, Booth 1997, and Lanser 2001 in 2.1.2 above).


with the implied author of the drama. There are two reasons for this.First, reconstructions of a work’s implied author generally involve contextual references to the situation of the empirical author. If we are not simply to ignore this central aspect of the concept’s use and meaning, we must construct the implied author of Hamlet as, in some sense at least, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and this meansthat we cannot see him as adopting the views of modern psycho-analysis.35 Attempting to attribute a contradiction-free psychoana-lytic interpretation of Hamlet to the implied author of the text is alsoill-judged because many alternative interpretations of the dramacould be developed along similar lines. Assuming they were also free of contradiction, these interpretations could then be ascribed to further implied authors.36 If we think through the pragmatism-baseddefinition of the concept to its end, in other words, we arrive at the highly counterintuitive conclusion that every work has as many im-plied authors as there are contradiction-free meanings that can be ascribed to it.

(2) In comparison to the pragmatist group, the conventionalist supporters of non-intentionalistic elucidation of the concept makedistinctly more exacting demands when it comes to determining theimplied author of a literary text. Their views are based on the intui-tion that reconstructing work meaning does not simply mean mak-ing an interpretive attribution of meaning that contradicts neither it-self nor the text under consideration. Instead, advocates of a con-ventionalist form of explication believe that Booth’s concept should be identified with the historical meaning of a literary work. For them, in other words, determining the implied author of a text re-quires that the text concerned be read with the help of the lexicon of the time in which it originated and against the background of the culture of that time. In the eyes of the conventionalists, then, a non-intentionalistic approach to literature need not, and in fact should

35 This does not, of course, mean that psychoanalytic interpretations of Hamletare unacceptable per se—they simply need to be based on a different normfrom that of the implied author.

36 The drama’s implied author could be understood in this way as a supporterof, for example, marxism, feminism, systems theory, and so on.

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not, lead to an anything-goes attitude to the attribution of meaning.Chatman, for example, writes as follows in this respect:

Anti-intentionalism does not argue that the study of conventions and mean-ings that prevailed during the artist’s lifetime are irrelevant or that the critic is misguided to search for them; to interpret Bach well one should know as much as possible about how music sounded in his time. To interpret Miltonwell, one should know as much as possible about seventeenth-century Christi-anity.37

The path of conventionalism is clearly more interesting than the pragmatism-based approach as a potential candidate for explicatingthe implied author, for it takes account of several important intui-tions that are bound up with use of the concept. Even so, however, it is not possible to develop an acceptable clarification of the concept on the basis of the idea that the implied author is the result of inter-pretation based on historical conventions of a linguistic and extra-linguistic nature. This becomes clear if we consider in somewhatmore detail the conventionalist picture of the process by which meaning is determined. Representatives of the conventionalist ap-proach to explicating the implied author usually comment only in very general terms, if at all, on what it means to understand a text in terms of the conventions of the time in which it was produced. It is clearly assumed that, as long as the appropriate information is available, determining the implied author of a work is an unprob-lematic affair that takes care of itself, so to speak. In adopting this view, supporters of conventionalist positions considerably underes-timate the scope open to the interpretive assignment of meaning. They fail to note that interpretation of a text on the basis of its struc-tures can be constrained only to a limited degree, even if it takesplace with reference to the conventions of the time in which the textoriginated. The conventionalist programme, that is to say, can in-deed prevent the interpretation of a text from producing anachro-nistic theses, but it cannot ensure that it will produce a single un-ambiguous result. Jerrold Levinson has precisely this in mind when

37 Chatman (1990a, 78).


he makes the following remark in his essay ‘Intention and Inter-pretation: A Last Look’:

Two writers writing the same texts in the same public language at a giventime may still end up saying different things, in virtue of their national identi-ties, what they have done in the world, what circles they belong to, what theirother works are like, etc.38

Reconstructing the meaning of a work, that is to say, necessitates a series of attributions that cannot be based on historical conventions. As Noël Carroll puts it in a piece written in 1993,

even if the appeal to convention alone has some intuitive appeal in discussionsof the interpretation of linguistic meaning proper, the attraction vanishes as we proceed to other levels of interpretation. For most artistic activity, includ-ing a great deal of literary composition, simply lacks the relatively determi-nate meaning conventions of words and sentences.39

The requirement of historical adequacy, then, does not make it pos-sible to constrain the interpretation of texts in a way that corre-sponds to the general idea of what reconstruction of the implied au-thor involves. This is clear, for example, from the difficulties that ironic texts pose for representatives of conventionalism in interpre-tation theory. To decide whether Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Pro-posal’ should be described as a case of irony,40 we need to do more than simply refer to a background consisting of the linguistic and extralinguistic conventions current in Ireland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Interpreting the essay appropriately requires that

38 Levinson (1992, 247). On such criticism of a conventionalist concept of themeaning of works, see also Hirsch (1967, 42–43), Tolhurst (1979, 4–5),Stecker (1987, 261–62; 1997, 187–88), and Currie (1991, 328–29). An over-view and appraisal of the positions in the debate on the text-work distinctioncan be found in Livingston (2005b).

39 Carroll (1993, 247). Carroll (1997, 306) develops these ideas further in replyto the criticism of his position in Dickie and Wilson (1995), Dickie (1997),and Wilson (1997).

40 This work is very popular among interpretation theorists; its full title is ‘A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People of Irelandfrom Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beni-ficial to the Public’.

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we take into consideration a whole range of additional historicalcontexts, ones that we do not learn about in the conventionalist pro-gramme, which tells us neither how to choose nor how to use them.41

Summarizing the above discussion, we can conclude that, like its pragmatism-based counterpart, the conventionalism-based form of non-intentionalistic explanation does not provide an adequate defi-nition of the implied author concept. It does do justice to one ideaclosely connected to the concept, the idea that implied authors in-volve historically appropriate assignments of meaning; it does not, however, take sufficient account of the equally fundamental idea that at most only one such assignment is permissible in each and every work. This intuition can be meaningfully reflected only in a clarification of the implied author that takes the empirical author and his intentions into consideration.42 Only in the context of such an explication is it possible to provide theoretical justification and methodological controls for the contextual references that are re-quired in order to place the necessary constraints on the range of possible interpretive assignments of meaning.43

3.3.2 Modelling and Explicating the Concept in the Context of an Intentionalistic Theory of Interpretation

At first glance, it may seem as if there has not yet been any serious attempt to model the implied author along the lines described at the end of the preceding paragraph; to date, hardly any work on Booth’s concept has been explicitly concerned with explicating it in an in-tentionalistic manner. H. Porter Abbott may write in his Cambridge

41 This position is widely held in the debates of interpretation theory, but it hasalso attracted repeated criticism (see, for example, Nathan 1982, 1992, Dickieand Wilson 1995, or Dickie 2006).

42 See Livingston (1996, 116–17).43 On the concept of context and the methods of contextualization, see Danne-

berg (1990, 2000).


Introduction to Narrative that the implied author is a ‘key conceptin interpretation, insofar as we are concerned with ‘authorial inten-tion’”,44 but this places him far outside the normal limits of a dis-cussion in which most contributions are characterized by an unmis-takably anti-intentionalistic rhetoric. If the various debates are con-sidered in more detail, however, it soon becomes apparent that at-tempts to clarify the implied author often see themselves in a man-ner at odds with the way in which they engage with the concept in practice. A not inconsiderable number of positions formulated in terms of conventionalism actually approach the definition and re-construction of the implied author by referring to the empirical au-thor in such a way that, contrary to how they see themselves, theyshould be categorized as attempts at intentionalistic explanation.

The general anti-intentionalistic bent that has been characteristicof discussion of Booth’s concept in the preceding decades is likelyto be the main explanation for why hardly any work on the impliedauthor refers to intentionalistic programmes of interpretation. In thisrespect, it is also important not to underestimate the consequences of the pronounced ignorance about the theory and history of inter-pretation displayed by many authors who have adopted entrenched attitudes to the problem of the implied author. Since the 1970s, de-bates on the concept have unfolded almost solely in the restrictedcontext of issues involving practical interpretation and textual de-scription, and thus ended up losing all points of contact with the controversies of literary and interpretation theory. For this reason,the implied author dispute has so far seen hardly any attention given either to the criticism of conventionalist positions described above or to the obvious renaissance that the intentionalistic approach tointerpretation has now been experiencing for ten years or so.45

Most responses to Booth’s concept give the impression that theanti-intentionalistic strain of literary theory—as manifested in the

44 Abbott (2002, 77; emphasis in original).45 Even in 1990, Currie was able to state in his Nature of Fiction that ‘antiinten-

tionalist hysteria is no longer with us’ (Currie 1990, 109). This observationwas not a case of wishful thinking, as the anthologies of Iseminger (1992a),Jannidis et al. (1999), and Detering (2002) show.

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New Criticism, structuralism, or poststructuralism, for example—has found nothing but unanimous support in the preceding decades.It has not been noted in these discussions that the rejection of inten-tionalism in interpretation theory has actually met with fundamentalcriticism during this time.46 ‘After several decades of living with the so-called “intentional fallacy”,’ Noël Carroll said concerning this metacriticism as early as 1993, ‘many … Anglo-American aestheti-cians are beginning to perceive fallacies in one of their foundingdoctrines’.47 Above all, though, the controversies about identifying and using the implied author generally overlook the fact that a com-prehensive explication of the intentionalistic programme of inter-pretation began to take shape in the 1980s in reaction to anti-intentionalism in literary theory. A number of different suggestionshave been made in the context of this theoretical clarification, but the supporters of intentionalism do at least seem to be agreed on two fundamental issues. First, they are unanimous in the view that speaking of intentions should not mean referring to the experiences, associations, thoughts, and feelings that authors have when produc-ing their works; instead, they believe, the term should be used to denote the ideas that writers seek to express in texts shaped to havea certain form.48 As long as intentionalistic interpretations take such a concept of intention as their starting point, there would seem to belittle danger that they will end up presenting us with psychologizingor biographically oriented reconstructions, even if they do draw on information about authors’ lives. ‘Admitting such evidence does notchange the fact that the object of interpretation is still the work’,49

as Robert Stecker puts it in his description of the interpretive im-plications of the concept of intention outlined here.

The second point of agreement among the supporters of inten-tionalism is a consensus, established for some years now, that the

46 See especially Hirsch (1967, 1976, 1983) and also Danneberg and Müller(1983).

47 Carroll (1993, 245).48 See, for example, Lyas (1992), Jannidis (2000), Livingston (2003, 2005a), or

Vandevelde (2005).49 Stecker (1997, 201).


relationship between authorial intentions and textual meaningsshould not been approached in the way suggested by Eric D. Hirsch’s well-known identity thesis.50 In more recent work on mod-elling an intentionalistic theory of interpretation, the controversialassumption that authorial intentions determine the meaning of textsis usually abandoned in favour of a less vulnerable position, simplyand concisely put by Sheila Lintott as follows: ‘intentions arerelevant to a correct interpretation of the work’.51

This recent concept of intentionalism will provide the startingpoint for the following discussion of the perspectives that presentthemselves when considering an intentionalistic explication of the implied author concept. We hope to determine whether Booth’s concept can be meaningfully treated as the subject to which are as-cribed the results of an interpretation that asks not what a possible speaker might have meant to say in the text being analysed in any given case but rather what the real author wanted to express in thattext. In order to assess the proposals and possibilities for defining the implied author in such a way, we must first make an importantdistinction between hypothetical intentionalism and actual inten-tionalism, the two basic lines currently being pursued in the context of intentionalistic interpretation.52 In doing so, we shall not attemptto say which of these two varieties of intentionalism is to be pre-ferred. To be sure, this question has received considerable attentionin many contributions to the debate, but we do not believe that the

50 On the debate surrounding the identity thesis, see Hirsch (1967, 1984),Beardsley (1970, 1982), and Dickie and Wilson (1995). If nothing else, itshould be noted here that the standard understanding of Hirsch’s identity the-sis in current practice is tenuous in the extreme (see Danneberg and Müller1983, 1984b).

51 Lintott (2002, 67).52 On these two positions, see Dutton (1987), Carroll (1992, 1993, 1997, 2000a,

2002), Currie (2003, 2004a), Levinson (1992, 1996, 2002), Nehamas (1981,1987), Iseminger (1992b, 1996, 1998), Livingston (1996, 1998, 2003,2005a), Nathan (1992, 2005, 2006), Stecker (1987, 1997, 2006), Trivedi(2001), Lintott (2002), Davies (2006), and Lamarque (2000, 2004). For thesake of simplicity, we shall not distinguish between moderate and radicalsupporters of these two forms of intentionalism in the following discussion.

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conflict between hypothetical and actual intentionalism can be set-tled simply by finding out how interpretive processes actually un-fold in everyday communication or critical study. ‘What has be-come apparent’, as Peter Lamarque has rightly pointed out, ‘is thatit is not enough just to get the philosophy of language right. Thesticking point is much deeper and concerns rival (and ancient) con-ceptions of art: as expression, as communication, as symbol, as mi-mesis.’53 For this reason, hypothetical intentionalism and actual in-tentionalism will in what follows be treated as two programmes of interpretation that are potentially equally acceptable. No prior as-sumption is made about the superiority of one or the other; we shall consider them separately from each other simply because this will allow us to see whether it might be possible and sensible to expli-cate the implied author in the context of one or the other, or both.

(1) The position that, following Levinson, is generally referred to using the term ‘hypothetical intentionalism’ can be understood as an attempt to take account of certain anti-intentionalistic arguments in the context of an intentionalistic programme of interpretation.54

Like those who oppose modes of interpretation in which the author is taken into consideration, the hypothetical intentionalists believe itis by no means self-evident that art in general and literature in par-ticular can be approached using everyday processes of understand-ing as a model. In addition, they too believe that taking the inten-tions of a text’s writer as a guide to interpretation can be problem-atic because aims are not always achieved and works sometimescontain unintended meanings. Unlike the opponents of intentional-ism, however, the hypothetical intentionalists do not conclude from these cautionary points that the author should be completely ignored when a text is interpreted. Instead, they suggest that the author be seen as the central point of reference for every appropriate inter-pretation of a work: only by means of the author is it possible to place viable and appropriate constraints on the process of assigningmeaning. It is true, the argument goes, that the semantic intentions

53 Lamarque (2000, 7).54 See, for example, Levinson (1992, 221; 1996a, 175).


of the author should be ignored when we interpret a literary text—but his categorial intentions, on the other hand, must be taken into consideration.55 The underlying idea behind the line taken by the advocates of hypothetical intentionalism is not new; the starting point lies in the concept of the meaning and understanding of texts outlined a quarter of a century ago by William Tolhurst in his essay ‘On What a Text Is and How It Means’. Setting himself apart from the positions of conventionalism and intentionalism, Tolhurst pro-posed in this essay that texts be seen as utterances, the meaning of which is defined as follows:

utterance meaning is best understood as the intention which a member of theintended audience would be most justified in attributing to the author based onthe knowledge and attitudes which he possesses in virtue of being a memberof the intended audience.56

This idea has since been taken up and developed further by manyphilosophers and literary theorists. By far the most elaborate sug-gestions for developing a programme of hypothetical intentionalismare those set out in a series of essays by Jerrold Levinson. He writes:

Poems, novels, short stories are literances—texts presented and projected in literary contexts, whose meaning, it is understood by both author and audi-ence, will be a function of and constrained by … the potentialities of the textper se together with the generative matrix provided by its issuing forth fromindividual A, with public persona B, at time C, against cultural background D,in light of predecessors E, in the shadow of contemporary events F, in relationto the remainder of A’s artistic oeuvre G, and so on.57

Tolhurst’s remarks on textual interpretation have been put into prac-tice and modified in various ways during the debates that have taken place on hypothetical intentionalism. The main issues dis-

55 On this distinction, see above all Levinson (1992, 188–89) and Dutton (1987,198–99).

56 Tolhurst (1979, 11). See Tolhurst and Wheeler (1979) for further details on this way of understanding a work. A detailed appraisal of Tolhurst’s ideascan be found in Danneberg and Müller (1983, 393–97).

57 Levinson (1996a, 184). Levinson coins the term ‘literances’ to refer to utter-ances that can be classified as literary texts.

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cussed by supporters of this approach to interpretation concern the following two questions: how are we to decide what contextual evi-dence it is permissible to use when reconstructing work meaning,and how are these decisions to be justified? In order to distinguish their methods from a traditional intentionalistic approach to the as-signment of meaning, the advocates of hypothetical intentionalismgenerally stipulate that the category of the informed or competent contemporary, rather than that of the intended reader, should be taken as a point of reference when we decide what contextual fac-tors are relevant to interpretation.58 Such provisions are designed to ensure that interpretations made in the style of hypothetical inten-tionalism are restricted to drawing on a closed subset of the sourcesof evidence to which recourse can be made in actual intentionalism.This subset consists of the knowledge generally available at the time when a text originated.

The making of literature is an individual, largely interior endeavor, but it isalso a public, convention-governed one, bound by mutually understood rulesfor producing and receiving literary offerings. These rules might quite natu-rally specify that facts related to context of origin beyond what an ideally pre-pared and backgrounded reader could generally be expected to know are ir-relevant to fixing or constituting the meaning of the work as an utterance in that context.59

Taking this kind of reflection as their starting point, some support-ers of hypothetical intentionalism have also considered the situation that arises when multiple meanings are suggested for a single text even when the admissible contextual evidence has been narrowed down. What criteria, that is to say, will allow us to evaluate thecompeting interpretations in such situations? The solutions put for-ward have not advanced beyond the rather vague suggestion that epistemic principles generally provide a way to decide between dif-ferent competing reconstructions of the meaning of a text. If this is of no help—that is, if the interpretations are equally plausible in a

58 See, for example, Levinson (1992, 227–29). For a detailed response to theseideas, see Stecker (1997, 197–99).

59 Levinson (2002, 313). See also Nehamas (1981, 145–46) or Levinson (1996a,185–86).


cognitive sense—it is suggested that they be evaluated on the basisof aesthetic criteria instead. Thus, those who subscribe to the pro-gramme of hypothetical intentionalism when interpreting texts seek to understand literary works from the perspective of well-informedcontemporaries whose reception of the works is subject to the principle of charity.60

Even from these brief remarks on the ideas behind hypothetical intentionalism, it should already be clear that the approach provides a suitable frame of reference in which to explicate the implied au-thor. This approach to determining the meaning of texts, which took shape in the wake of Tolhurst’s ideas, can be used as the foundationfor a definition of the implied author that reflects central aspects of the concept without reproducing the deficits apparent in most defi-nitions that are currently available.

The programme of hypothetical intentionalism gives a precise description of how the intentional composition of literary texts can be conceptually reconstructed in such a way that historically appro-priate and semantically unambiguous results can be expected. In this way, the foundations are laid for the conceptual statement of an idea that is hinted at in many definitions of the implied author with-out being worked out to the extent that it should be—the idea that Booth’s concept be understood as an entity to which can be ascribed the beliefs, attitudes, and aims that recipients attribute to the writer of a text when they read it. Levinson, the most prominent and ener-getic supporter of hypothetical intentionalism, has explicitly sug-gested that the implied author be defined accordingly; in his essay ‘Messages in Art’, he says of Booth’s concept that

given this notion, then instead of speaking of beliefs and attitudes that wouldbe reasonably attributed to the actual author on the basis of the work contex-tually grasped, we can speak of the beliefs or attitudes that just straightfor-

60 On this, see for example Levinson (1992, 225): ‘if we can, in a given case, make the author out to have created a cleverer or more striking or more ima-ginative piece, without violating the image of his work as an artist …, weshould perhaps do so. That is then our best projection of intent—“best” intwo senses—as informed and sympathetic readers.’

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wardly belong to the implied author—he or she is being a construction tailor-made to bear them.61

Characterizing the implied author in this way gives the concept aspecific methodological role and increases its conceptual clarity.62

Such a description is conceptually clearer than most current defini-tions because it sets Booth’s concept firmly apart from the categoryof the real author. Elucidating the implied author in the context ofhypothetical intentionalism allows us to take account of the idea that the implied author should be identified on the basis of ‘all thechoices the author had in fact made, whether consciously or un-consciously’.63 At the same time, this approach abandons the beliefof Booth and other supporters of the concept, according to whichtextual analysis along these lines makes it possible ‘to come as close as possible to sitting in the author’s chair and making this text, becoming able to remake it, employing the author’s “reason-of-art”’.64 With the help of hypothetical intentionalism, it is possible to give an exact statement of how the empirical author can be un-derstood as a point of reference for interpretation without also being the ultimate objective pursued in it. Furthermore, we obtain a me-thodologically precise idea of the implied author if we take this path and define it as an entity to which are attributed the results obtainedwhen a text is interpreted according to the principles of hypotheticalintentionalism. Unlike many explanations of Booth’s concept, work carried out in the context of hypothetical intentionalism does not assume that determining the basic meaning of a text is somethingthat more or less takes care of itself. This means that, as a rule, wefind admirably careful statements of what the aim of critical inter-pretations should be, what maxims they should follow, and what contextual information they can draw on.65

61 Levinson (1996b, 229; emphasis in original).62 See 1.2.3 above. 63 Booth (1982, 21).64 Booth (1982, 21).65 On the methodological vagueness in most views of the implied author, see

1.2 and 2.2 above.


If we decide on the course outlined above—that of explicating the implied author in the context of hypothetical intentionalism—itis important to realize that it is advisable to give the result of the ex-plication a name different from that of what was explicated. We do not, of course, always have to give concepts new names when we refine our understanding of them. The term ‘implied author’, how-ever, has been used so differently in the past and continues to be used so differently in the present that it would hardly be sensible tocontinue using the old name to refer to the new, refined concept. If we treat Booth’s concept as the subject with the intentions about which we make inferences in the sense of hypothetical intentional-ism, we should not refer to it as the implied author in our interpre-tations. A new name is needed. The most sensible solution, we sug-gest, is to speak either of the ‘hypothetical author’,66 with reference to the underlying interpretive programme, or of the ‘postulated au-thor’, following Alexander Nehamas. The latter term stands for a concept that is explicitly based on Tolhurst’s ideas about the inter-pretation of literary texts.67

(2) The intentionalistic interpretive programme envisaged by Tolhurst is not the only one to have been developed as part of the renaissance currently being experienced by the concept of the au-thor. Another such programme, usually referred to as actual inten-tionalism to set it apart from hypothetical intentionalism,68 is based

66 This term was introduced by Nathan (1992, 199). The expression ‘inferredauthor’, frequently considered as an alternative term, is misleading—it isequally suitable for referring to the subject to which are attributed the resultsof an interpretation based on actual intentionalism (see 3.3.2 below). The al-ternative terms ‘text intention’ (‘Textintention’) and ‘narrative strategy’ (‘Er-zählstrategie’; my translations) considered in Kindt and Müller (1999) arealso liable to be misunderstood and should therefore be avoided. They sug-gest associations with concepts whose scope is clearly narrower than the ex-plication of the implied author outlined here (see also 2.3 above).

67 See Nehamas (1981). The central differences between Booth’s implied authorand the concept Nehamas puts forward are set out in Nehamas (1987, 273–74).

68 The term appears for the first time in Iseminger’s essay ‘Actual Intentional-ism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism’ (see Iseminger 1996, 319).

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on the idea that the aesthetic anti-intentionalism of the twentiethcentury can be credited at most with having drawn attention to cer-tain dubious developments in the field of textual interpretation. The supporters of actual intentionalism, that is to say, believe it is an “exercise in overkill” to adopt the view—by no means restricted to the New Criticism in the twentieth century—that the author and his intentions must be ignored when interpreting works:

in performing the useful service of disposing of what might be called the ‘bio-grapher’s fallacy’, anti-intentionalists embraced a number of philosophicalcommitments that went far beyond their own purposes, as well as beyondplausibility.69

Actual intentionalism proposes that the fundamental procedure used to interpret literary texts should be the same as that followed when identifying the meaning of contributions to conversations in prag-matic communication situations.70 We should, that is to say, aim to determine the intentions of the empirical author.71 Like the support-ers of hypothetical intentionalism, the advocates of actual inten-tionalism suggest that works of literature be seen as utterances; un-like the hypothetical intentionalists, they believe that the meaning of utterances, and thus also that of literary works, is crucially depen-dent on the semantic intentions of the speaker or writer in any given case.72 Drawing on Eric D. Hirsch, Gary Iseminger has captured the guiding idea behind actual intentionalism as follows: the meaningof a work lies in the intentions successfully realized by its author,specifically ‘that utterer’s meaning which is compatible with the

69 Carroll (1992, 98).70 Like Carroll, some supporters of actual intentionalism refer to conversation

rather than communication. Trivedi (2001) has convincingly shown that thisis misleading, to say the least.

71 For criticism of this additional assumption, see for example Dickie and Wil-son (1995).

72 The idea that literary texts should be understood as utterances is anything butuncontroversial (see, for example, Olsen 1982, Lamarque 2002, 2004 or Kie-fer 2005).


meaning of the word-sequence uttered’.73 Actual intentionalism,then, conceives of the meaning of texts and models the objective of interpretation in such a way that its approach is neither conceptuallynor methodologically challenged by the possibility that speakersmight not manage to say what they intended. Sheila Lintott hasrecently made this clear in response to criticism repeatedly levelled against the project of actual intentionalism by the conventionalist camp and the supporters of hypothetical intentionalism:

Actual intentionalists do not hold that only successful works of art are propersubjects of actual intentionalist interpretation. The view is importantly differ-ent from this; it is rather that of the artist’s intentions, only those that the workcan have—express, embody, support—are truly relevant to a correct interpre-tation of the work.74

Regardless of the individual differences in opinion that separate the supporters of hypothetical intentionalism on the one hand from those of actual intentionalism on the other, both groups are very largely agreed regarding the methodology that should be used in textual interpretation.75 In both these forms of intentionalism, thepurpose of interpretation is to state precisely what intentions it ap-pears most reasonable to attribute to the author against the back-ground of various historical contexts and the literary text concerned. Noël Carroll has outlined the idea of interpretation that underliesactual intentionalism as follows: ‘interpretations of artworks’, hewrites, ‘should be constrained by our knowledge of the biography of the historical artist and our best hypotheses about the artist’s ac-tual intentions concerning the artworks in question’.76 The only

73 Iseminger (1996, 322; emphasis in original). Corresponding formulations canbe found in, for example, Stecker (1997, 171) or Carroll’s statement that: ‘where the linguistic unit can support more than one possible meaning, the … actual intentionalist maintains that the correct interpretation is the one that iscompatible with the author’s actual intentions, which itself must be support-able by the language of the text’ (Carroll 2000a, 76).

74 Lintott (2002, 66; emphasis in original). This piece is a reply to Trivedi(2001).

75 See, for example, Levinson (1992, 224), Stecker (1997, 201), or Lamarque(2004, 7).

76 Carroll (1997, 305).

Exit IA? 179

marked methodological difference between the two forms of inten-tionalism lies in the fact that the representatives of actual intention-alism believe it is permissible, even advisable, to draw on informa-tion that was not available to well-informed contemporaries of the writer. Examples of such information that can be used if the need arises when identifying the meaning of a work include retrospective authorial remarks, personal diaries, or private epistolary exchanges. Robert Stecker writes in his book Artworks that ‘such expression obviously is evidence of intention’; he goes on to add that ‘if we were really trying to formulate the epistemically best hypothesis about an author’s intention, we would not ignore such expression’.77

It is easy to see that, unlike hypothetical intentionalism, actual intentionalism does not provide a suitable frame of reference inwhich to explicate the concept of the implied author. Textual inter-pretations that follow the guidelines of actual intentionalism do not require an additional entity to which to attribute the meaning of a text; instead, in this approach to interpretation, the meaning of a text is to be attributed directly to the empirical producer of the work in question.78 Actual intentionalism is based on a concept of the authorin which the author is defined as an interpretive attribution ofmeaning and thus clearly set apart from interpretations held back by psychologism or biographism. Consequently, there is no need for the implied author in the approach of actual intentionalism.79

77 Stecker (1997, 201). See also Carroll (2002, 344).78 For a cognitivist variant of this position, see Margolin (2003, 277).79 Some participants in the debate on the implied author take a different view on

this matter. William Irwin, for example, believes that not only hypotheticalintentionalism but also actual intentionalism requires a instance behind thetext distinct from the author, see Irwin (2002, 194–195). And James Phelan,while arguing for an intentionalistic clarification of Booth’s ideas, has never-theless declared his support for retaining the implied author concept. He pro-poses to explicate the category as follows: ‘the implied author is a stream-lined version of the real author, an actual or purported subset of the realauthor’s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other properties thatplay an active role in the construction of the particular text’ (Phelan 2005,45; emphasis in original).


Thus, actual intentionalism essentially ends up departing from Booth’s concept rather than clarifying it. Even so, it can still help us to get a better grip on an idea that, although frequently associated with the implied author, is not expressed adequately in current defi-nitions of the concept—the idea that the implied author stands forimages that authors produce of themselves in their works.80 This impression has received considerable attention in the implied authordebate since Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction; somewhat surprisingly, though, it has rarely to date been noted that it can be properly ac-counted for only in the context of an intentionalistic approach to in-terpretation—in the context, that is to say, of actual intentionalismor hypothetical intentionalism. Only by determining the authorial intentions (actual or hypothetical) at work in any given case can we tell if the author of a concrete text is attempting to put across animage of himself, and what that image looks like if he is. The self-image of the author with which we are concerned here, in other words, involves a (proper or improper) subset of the attributionsmade in the context of intentionalistic interpretations, or an infe-rence drawn from those attributions and justified in terms of inter-pretation theory. If it is really necessary to introduce a special termto use when referring to such (parts of) the results of interpretation, it would seem advisable to choose one that is clearly distinguished from the expressions ‘author’ and ‘implied author’.

The first part of our study considered the context in which the im-plied author concept took shape, some typical ways in which it has been received, and some proposals that have been put forward for replacing it. This led up to the second part of the book, in which we have explicated the components of the concept and suggested one way in which it could be used in future. The discussions in the firstpart were important in shaping the insight behind our explication, namely the awareness that the implied author concept consists ofcomponents that express correct intuitions in and of themselves, yet

80 See most recently Booth (2005). This view should be clearly distinguishedfrom reception theory’s idea of the author-image (see 1.2.3. and 3.1 above).

Exit IA? 181

conflict with one another when combined together in a single con-cept. For this reason, we set out to clarify the individual compo-nents of the concept separately from one another and investigate what, if any, explications presented themselves in each case. The re-sultant analysis suggests that explicating the implied author as a participant in communication would not be sensible but that expli-cating it as an entity to which the meaning of a text is attributed could well be. More precisely, this means explicating it as the hy-pothetical or postulated author in the conceptual context of hypo-thetical intentionalism. This explication, however, entails narrowing the meaning of the established implied author concept so specifical-ly that it seems inappropriate to continue using the expression ‘im-plied author’ for the result. And so our study has ended by puttingforward a plausible explication for the concept and suggesting that the term ‘implied author’ be abandoned when referring to it.

It remains to be seen whether this negative proposal regarding the use of the concept will be accepted by the scholarly community. What our study has shown is that the history of concepts in cultural studies, even highly problematic ones, can be reconstructed ration-ally as a forerunner to explication. Controversies about concepts such as the implied author involve neither a confrontation between irreconcilable dogmas nor a dispute over empty terms. The story ofthe implied author can be reconstructed as that of a term tied to cor-rect intuitions but put together with problematic consequences. Ifwe see the story of the concept introduced by Wayne C. Booth in this way, it turns out to have a positive ending after all—it provides us with an explication of the concept and a suggestion for using it, albeit without the familiar name. At the same time, the story shows us that the history of concepts, at least when studied with explica-tion in mind, need not amount simply to a description of intricate variety but can also increase our understanding by bringing clarity and progress.

Abbreviations

BJA The British Journal of Aesthetics

IASL Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur

JAAC The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

JLS Journal of Literary Semantics

JNT Journal of Narrative Theory (prior to vol. 29: Journal of Narrative Technique)

LWU Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht

MLN Modern Language Notes

NLH New Literary History

PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

DVjs Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte

SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

ZAA Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

ZfaW Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie

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Acknowledgements

This book took shape between 2001 and 2004 in the context of a project attached to the University of Hamburg’s Narratology Re-search Group, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

A preliminary outline of the study was presented at a DFG-sponsored conference on the theme ‘Return of the Author?’ organ-ized by Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, and Matias Martinez in 1997; we would like to thank the participants at this conference for their suggestions and constructive criticism. Col-leagues in the Narratology Research Group in Hamburg made regu-lar contributions to the project as it evolved. Matthias Aumüller, Oliver David Krug, Gunther Martens, and Jan Christoph Meister read and commented informatively on a first draft of the book. We are most grateful to them, and to Jens Eder and Tilmann Köppe, for their help. Furthermore, we would like to thank Sophia Jungmann, Wilhelm Schernus and Manuel Werder for valuable expert advice. We are also grateful to the two readers from the Narratologia series advisory board who subjected the manuscript to a close reading and provided constructive criticism of our ideas. Finally, our special thanks are due to Alastair Matthews, who translated the text and clarified some difficult points. Any shortcomings that remain are our responsibility alone.

Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller

Göttingen and Hamburg, March 2006

Documents

48121891 Implied Author