Authorial Intent

For the purposes of this discussion, I suppose I will define Authorial Intent as the idea that the author of a work (let's say a novel) writes with intentionality and that intent can be found within and as part of the text.


For a while now, critical theorists have argued that "the author's intent is irrelevant to understanding a piece of literature." (that's from Wikipedia, because I am lazy; also, I am not an academic and my understanding of critical theory is, shall we say, sparse; so if y...