Implied Author

Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller
The Implied Author

Narratologia
Contributions to Narrative Theory/
Beiträge zur Erzähltheorie
Edited by/Herausgegeben von

Fotis Jannidis, John Pier, Wolf Schmid
Editorial Board/Wissenschaftlicher Beirat

Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik
José Angel Garcı́a Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn
Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Matı́as Martı́nez
Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning
Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer
Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert
≥
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller
The Implied Author

Concept and Controversy
≥
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
Translated by Alastair Matthews
앪앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within

the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
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⫺
II. Title.
PN213.K56 2006
808.3⫺dc22
200602757
ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018948-3
ISBN-10: 3-11-018948-8
ISSN 1612-8427
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
쑔 Copyright 2006 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includ-
ing photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin
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................................ 17
1.1 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 ................................... 123
2.3.2 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 technical
term in the strict sense that, say, the heterodiegetic narrator is. With
the concept, Booth drew unmistakable attention to the role of the
author 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 positivism
started to appear at the end of the nineteenth century.1 The contro-
versy reached a climax in proclamations of the death of the author,2
but still shows little sign of ending, the subsequent ‘return of the
author’ 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 the
context 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 of
the 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 development
of 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 insights
into 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: ‘Any
word worth explicating has some contexts which, as wholes, are clear and
precise enough to be useful; and the purpose of explication is to preserve the
usage 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 synonymous
with the corresponding context of the definiens.’ On explication, see also
Carnap (1950), Quine (1960), Robinson (1968), Pawáowski (1980), Danne-
berg (1989b, 1991), Müller (1989), Fricke (2000), and Rey (2000).
5 Weitz (1977) provides a remarkably clear introduction to the function of
open concepts in the humanities; regrettably, though, this work is ignored by
literary 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 cultural
studies.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 terminological
legacy 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 very
least 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 to
be misunderstood’; second, their use is not controlled by ‘esoteric
groups of speakers’ who have the ‘ability to ensure that the names
chosen for concepts become obligatory in terminological practice’.8
Rarely 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 have
long 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 explicit
definitions, 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 is
heuristically significant in the narrower context of scholarly activity
as 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 is
hoped in every case that the concept concerned will find the same
use 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 important
with the growing focus on interdisciplinarity that is now particularly
prominent 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 pathetic
rhetoric of boundary crossings to good effect.12 Theories and meth-
9 See, with references to further reading, Kindt and Müller (2005, 339–41). See
also 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 opening
up 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 is
lacking real clarity.16 These are also the most frequent explanations
that present themselves when interdisciplinary studies fail to arrive
logical dogma, and elitist prejudice and value judgment, cultural studies has
been uniquely instrumental in at least making the academic community aware
of the conservative nature of its endeavours, if not everywhere forcing it to
change.’
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 elaboration
and a defence, is extremely simple: namely, interdisciplinarity in the humani-
ties, necessary, exciting, serious must seek its heuristic and methodological
basis in concepts rather than in methods’ (emphasis in original).
14 As, for example, in Bal (2002, 11): ‘While groping to define, provisionally
and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it
can 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, one
might 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 in
which 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 interdisciplinarity
with freedom, and disciplinarity with constraint, a closer look at the history
of these disciplines shows that the dialectics of agency and determinism, cur-
rently distributed across the disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity divide, was at
the 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 forms
being propagated as academic lingua francas.17 It is perfectly ac-
ceptable to suspend the normal requirements for explicating critical
concepts 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 terminological
significance 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 Chicago
school of criticism will have an importance place in the discussion,
as will the dominant position of the New Criticism in the academic
study of literature in America. The New Criticism was based on
ideas that were aesthetically specific but epistemologically indis-
tinct. The New Critics saw the literary text as the sole legitimate
frame of reference for work in literary studies, and unceremoniously
dismissed as fallacious any attempt to take context, particularly a
work’s author and recipients, into consideration.
Our reconstruction of the concept’s introduction is intended to
identify as precisely as possible the specific contextual conditions
against 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 The
Rhetoric of Fiction but actually introduced a cover term for several
concepts 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 image
of the real author. It is impossible to say for certain which of these
uses 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 foul
of 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 subsequent
reception of Booth’s work.
Like the meaning of the term itself, the theoretical status of the
implied 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 theory
of 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 at
work 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 simply
postulated that it plays an important role in literary communication;
he neither specified the theoretical framework in which the implied
author was to be used nor provided a methodology for identifying it
in individual cases.
It was the academic study of literature in Europe that responded
to the concept of the implied author most quickly and used it most
widely. 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 studying
literature 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 definition
of 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 role
beyond 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 European
literary 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 development
chronologically, 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 features
that 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, arguments
are 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, the
concept 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 implied
author 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 embraced
most often in relation to interpretive practice, with supporters of
normative interpretation in all its forms making use of the concept
in 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 the
dominant 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 of
a 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 felt
it necessary to lift Booth’s concept out of the rhetorical haze of the
1960s and update its image to fit the contemporary climate. One
way 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, we
confine 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 that
reflect correct intuitions in and of themselves, but conflict with one
another 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 implied
author 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 in
communication 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 author
cannot 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 associated
with 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 intentionalistic
counterpart. 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 refer
to 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 the
implied 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 imprecise
concept 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).
18 The Origins of the Implied Author Concept
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 causa
finalis.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, Modern
Philology,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 The
Sewanee 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 Tom

Jones 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
89
his fictional world upon the reader.
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
93
rhetors and their hearers has indeed been my center.
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.
96
But this kind of intrusion clearly cannot be treated as a single device.
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

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).

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 and
after.
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.5
The 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.6
The 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.
Dpoufyut!pg!Sfdfqujpo
Joufsqsfubujpo Eftdsjqujpo
Uifpsz!pg!Joufsqsfubujpo Kvtujgjdbujpo Dsjujdjtn

Joufsqsfubujpo!jo!Qsbdujdf Npefm)t* Bmufsobujwf)t*
Qpfujdt0Joufsqsfubujpo
Kvtujgjdbujpo Dsjujdjtn Kvtujgjdbujpo Dsjujdjtn
Npefm)t* Bmufsobujwf)t* Npefm)t* Bmufsobujwf)t*
Qptjujwf!Sftqpotft Ofhbujwf!Sftqpotft
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).
2:63 2:72 2:77 2:81

Cppui(t Cppui(t Ljmmibn(t!fttbz Obssbujwf!uifpsz0Obssbupmphz
QNMB!fttbz Uif!Sifupsjd!pg!Gjdujpo
Sfdfqujpo!jo!sfmbujpo!up!joufsqsfubujpo!uifpsz
Sfdfqujpo!jo!sfmbujpo!up!joufsqsfubujpo!jo!qsbdujdf
Sfdfqujpo!jo!sfmbujpo!up!eftdsjqujpo
Tubhf!1 Tubhf!2 Tubhf!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 published

between 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 Fiction
can 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
23
reader as he participates, expects, accepts, rejects.
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 Wild
is 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 Gatsby

exemplifies 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
75
literary objects and their parts.
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-
76
quires adjustments of the grid.
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).
Obssbujwf!ufyu
Sfbm Jnqmjfe Jnqmjfe Sfbm

)Obssbups* )Obssbuff* sfbefs
bvuips bvuips sfbefs
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).
DPNNVOJDBUJPO
besfttfs nfttbhf besfttff
NJNFTJT!PG!DPNNVOJDBUJPO
ejbmphvf-!obssbujpo
pg!xibu!xbt!tbje
jnqmjfe esbnbuj{fe
xsjufs!!jnqmjfe!!esbnbuj{fe!!esbnbuj{fe!!obssbujwf!!obssbuff!!npefm!!bvuipsjbm!!sfbm
esbnbuj{fe npefm bvuipsjbm sfbm
bvuips bvuips obssbups sfbefs sfbefs sfbefs
besfttfs nfttbhf besfttff

OBSSBUJWF!DPNNVOJDBUJPO
108
Fig. 4. Martin’s model of narrative communication
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 BartoszyĔski (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 role

in 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

120
single text.
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 Narrative

Discourse 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:

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

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, Eco
1990a), 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 The
rhetoric of fiction’ (Eco 1990a, 17).
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).
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 Rhetoric
of 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).
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.

152 Possibilities for Explicating the Implied Author
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 use
of 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, because
there 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 this
reason, 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 some
of 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 recipients
create 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 try
to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who
writes 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 Lektüre
ein 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 in
question has or had when reading literary texts. Genette, for ex-
ample, introduces his treatment of the implied author in Narrative
Discourse 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 fictive
narrator; 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 well
as I can—and if possible without taking advantage of too many extratextual
pieces 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 implications
of 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). On
this, 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 du
narrateur 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 exploiter
trop d’indications extratextuelles, derrière l’image explicite de ce narrateur
naïf 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 not
formed 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 most
attempts 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 apply
the relevant findings to the speech of characters as well.
9 Not infrequently, however, it is simply a figure of speech or the equivalent
that is involved when the implied author is accredited with a voice or worked
into 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 has
expressed 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 a
text 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 literary
texts, 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 that
this participation could have a certain specific nature. A closer
analysis 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 the
assumption 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 actually
by 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 the
narrator 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 a
widespread 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 compatible
with a wide range of divergent positions, and is also a strategy
adopted 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 which
some 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 positions
of 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 the
dominant 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 (as
some 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 concerned
with interpretation in practice)20 be clearly more complex than sim-
ply describing individual elements and structures in the text.21 A
reconstruction 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 suffering
of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of the
completed 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 in
practice 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 literary

texts.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. Something
defined 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 the
concept 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 competing
concepts of work meaning and divergent methods for determining
it. 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 possibilities
for 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 orientation
and 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 domain
of 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.
Uif!jnqmjfe!bvuips!bt!b!qptuvmbufe!tvckfdu!cfijoe!uif!ufyu
opo.joufoujpobmjtujd!npefmt joufoujpobmjtujd!npefmt
wbsjbout!cbtfe wbsjbout!cbtfe izqpuifujdbm bduvbm

po!qsbhnbujtn po!dpowfoujpobmjtn joufoujpobmjtn joufoujpobmjtn
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 between
competing 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. Wimsatt
and 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 literary
analysis 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 kind
of 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, the
results 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.
Exit IA? 163
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 of
it. 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 has
been 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 interpretation
according 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 does
not seem appropriate to say that such an interpretation provides us
32 See Strube (2000, 67) on the requirement of being essentially appropriate to

the 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 historical
concept, 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 one
implied author’. Explications of the concept that adopt such a view, of
course, amount to abandoning the implied author entirely (see our remarks on
Preston 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 means
that 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 also
ill-judged because many alternative interpretations of the drama
could 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-based
definition 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 make
distinctly more exacting demands when it comes to determining the
implied 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 Hamlet

are unacceptable per se—they simply need to be based on a different norm
from that of the implied author.
36 The drama’s implied author could be understood in this way as a supporter
of, for example, marxism, feminism, systems theory, and so on.
Exit IA? 165
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 Milton
well, 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 explicating
the 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 somewhat
more 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 takes
place with reference to the conventions of the time in which the text
originated. 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 given
time 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 their
other 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 discussions
of 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 the

meaning 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 distinction
can be found in Livingston (2005b).
39 Carroll (1993, 247). Carroll (1997, 306) develops these ideas further in reply
to 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 Ireland
from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beni-
ficial to the Public’.
Exit IA? 167
we take into consideration a whole range of additional historical

contexts, 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 idea
closely 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 has
also attracted repeated criticism (see, for example, Nathan 1982, 1992, Dickie
and 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 concept

in 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, they
should be categorized as attempts at intentionalistic explanation.
The general anti-intentionalistic bent that has been characteristic
of discussion of Booth’s concept in the preceding decades is likely
to be the main explanation for why hardly any work on the implied
author refers to intentionalistic programmes of interpretation. In this
respect, 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 restricted
context 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 to
interpretation has now been experiencing for ten years or so.45
Most responses to Booth’s concept give the impression that the
anti-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 observation
was not a case of wishful thinking, as the anthologies of Iseminger (1992a),
Jannidis et al. (1999), and Detering (2002) show.
Exit IA? 169
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 fundamental
criticism 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 founding
doctrines’.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 suggestions
have 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 have
a certain form.48 As long as intentionalistic interpretations take such
a concept of intention as their starting point, there would seem to be
little danger that they will end up presenting us with psychologizing
or biographically oriented reconstructions, even if they do draw on
information about authors’ lives. ‘Admitting such evidence does not
change 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 meanings

should 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 controversial
assumption that authorial intentions determine the meaning of texts
is usually abandoned in favour of a less vulnerable position, simply
and concisely put by Sheila Lintott as follows: ‘intentions are
relevant to a correct interpretation of the work’.51
This recent concept of intentionalism will provide the starting
point for the following discussion of the perspectives that present
themselves 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 that
text. In order to assess the proposals and possibilities for defining
the implied author in such a way, we must first make an important
distinction 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 attempt
to say which of these two varieties of intentionalism is to be pre-
ferred. To be sure, this question has received considerable attention
in 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, it
should be noted here that the standard understanding of Hirsch’s identity the-
sis in current practice is tenuous in the extreme (see Danneberg and Müller
1983, 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 the
sake of simplicity, we shall not distinguish between moderate and radical
supporters of these two forms of intentionalism in the following discussion.
Exit IA? 171
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 that
it is not enough just to get the philosophy of language right. The
sticking 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 it
is 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 sometimes
contain 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 assigning
meaning. 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 the
intended audience would be most justified in attributing to the author based on
the knowledge and attitudes which he possesses in virtue of being a member
of the intended audience.56
This idea has since been taken up and developed further by many
philosophers and literary theorists. By far the most elaborate sug-
gestions for developing a programme of hypothetical intentionalism
are 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 text
per se together with the generative matrix provided by its issuing forth from
individual 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 relation
to 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 ideas
can 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.
Exit IA? 173
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 intentionalism
generally 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 sources
of 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 is
also a public, convention-governed one, bound by mutually understood rules
for 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 the
competing 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 these
ideas, 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 basis

of 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-informed
contemporaries 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 foundation
for 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 would
be 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 …, we
should perhaps do so. That is then our best projection of intent—“best” in
two senses—as informed and sympathetic readers.’
Exit IA? 175
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 a
specific 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 category
of the real author. Elucidating the implied author in the context of
hypothetical intentionalism allows us to take account of the idea
that the implied author should be identified on the basis of ‘all the
choices the author had in fact made, whether consciously or un-
consciously’.63 At the same time, this approach abandons the belief
of Booth and other supporters of the concept, according to which
textual 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 obtained
when a text is interpreted according to the principles of hypothetical
intentionalism. 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 something
that more or less takes care of itself. This means that, as a rule, we
find 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—it
is 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 to
continue 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 ‘inferred
author’, frequently considered as an alternative term, is misleading—it is
equally suitable for referring to the subject to which are attributed the results
of 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) are
also 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 author
and 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).
Exit IA? 177
on the idea that the aesthetic anti-intentionalism of the twentieth

century 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 philosophical
commitments that went far beyond their own purposes, as well as beyond
plausibility.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 meaning
of 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 this
is 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 but
uncontroversial (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 conceptually
nor methodologically challenged by the possibility that speakers
might not manage to say what they intended. Sheila Lintott has
recently 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 proper
subjects 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 work
can 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, the
purpose 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 underlies
actual intentionalism as follows: ‘interpretations of artworks’, he
writes, ‘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 can

be 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 is
compatible 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 in
which 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 author
in which the author is defined as an interpretive attribution of
meaning 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 hypothetical
intentionalism but also actual intentionalism requires a instance behind the
text 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 real
author’s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other properties that
play 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 for
images that authors produce of themselves in their works.80 This
impression has received considerable attention in the implied author
debate 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 intentionalism
or 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 an
image 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 attributions
made 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 term
to 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 first
part were important in shaping the insight behind our explication,
namely the awareness that the implied author concept consists of
components that express correct intuitions in and of themselves, yet
80 See most recently Booth (2005). This view should be clearly distinguished
from 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 putting
forward 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 of
the implied author can be reconstructed as that of a term tied to cor-
rect intuitions but put together with problematic consequences. If
we 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

Works Cited
Abbott 2002
H. Porter Abbott: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP 2002.
Abrams 1998
M. H. Abrams: The Transformation of English Studies. In: Thomas Bender
and Carl E. Schorske (eds.): American Academic Culture in Transforma-
tion. Fifty Years, Four Disciplines. Princeton: Princeton UP 1998, 123-
149.
Aczel 1998
Richard Aczel: Hearing Voices in Narrative Texte. In: NLH 29 (1998),
467-500.
Adam 2003
Wolfgang Adam et al. (eds.): Wissenschafts- und Systemveränderung. Re-
zeptionsforschung in Ost und West – eine konvergente Entwicklung? Hei-
delberg: Winter 2003 (Beihefte zum Euphorion 44).
Allrath 1998
Gaby Allrath: “But why will you say that I am mad?” Textuelle Signale für
die Ermittlung von unreliable narration. In: Nünning 1998a, 59-79.
Allrath 2000
Gaby Allrath: A Survey of the Theory, History, and New Areas of Re-
search of Feminist Narratology. In: LWU 33:4 (2000), 387-410.
Allrath and Gymnich 2002
Gaby Allrath and Marion Gymnich: Feministische Narratologie. In: Nün-
ning and Nünning 2002a, 35-72.
Anderson and Valente 2002
Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (eds.): Disciplinarity at the Fin de
Siècle. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP 2002.
Antczak 1995a
Frederick J. Antczak (ed.): Rhetoric and Pluralism. Legacies of Wayne C.
Booth. Columbus: Ohio State UP 1995.
Antczak 1995b
Frederick J. Antczak: Introduction. In: Antczak 1995a, 1-15.
Aristotle Poetics
Aristotle: Poetics. Trans. with intro. and notes by Malcolm Heath. London:
Penguin 1986.
186 Works Cited
Aristotle Physics
Aristotle: Physics. Ed. with intro. by David Bostock, trans. Robin Water-
field. Oxford: Oxford UP 1999.
Arnold and Detering 1996
Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Heinrich Detering (eds.): Grundzüge der Lite-
raturwissenschaft. München: dtv 1996.
Artz 1995
Lee Artz: Bibliography: Wayne C. Booth. In: Antczak 1995a, 309-322.
Baah 1999
Robert Baah: Rethinking Narrative Unreliability. In: JLS 28:3 (1999), 180-
188.
Bal 1981a
Mieke Bal: Notes on Narrative Embedding. In: Poetics Today 2:2 (1981),
41-59.
Bal 1981b
Mieke Bal: The Laughing Mice – or: On Focalization. In: Poetics Today
2:2 (1981), 202-210.
Bal 1985
Mieke Bal: Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto,
Buffalo and London: Toronto UP 1985.
Bal 2002
Mieke Bal: Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. To-
ronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto UP 2002.
Baker 1977
John Ross Baker: From Imitation to Rhetoric. The Chicago Critics, Wayne
C. Booth and Tom Jones. In: Spilka 1977, 136-156.
Barsch et al. 1994
Achim Barsch et al.: Empirische Literaturwissenschaft in der Diskussion.
Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1994.
BartoszyĔski 1973
Kazimierz BartoszyĔski: Das Problem der literarischen Kommunikation in
narrativen Werken. In: Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 47 (1973), 202-
224.
Beardsley 1970
Monroe C. Beardsley: The Authority of the Text. In: M. C. B.: The Possi-
bility of Criticism. Detroit: Wayne State UP 1970, 16-37.
Beardsley 1982
Monroe C. Beardsley: Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revived.
In: M. C. B.: The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays. Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP 1982, 188-207.
Beebe 1961/62
Maurice Beebe: Through a Glass Darkly (Review Booth 1961). In: Mo-
dern Fiction Studies 7:4 (1961/62), 373-374.
Works Cited 187
Berman 1988
Art Berman: From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Urbana Ill.: Illinois UP 1988.
Bérube 2004
Michael Bérubé: There Is Nothing Inside the Text, or, Why No One’s
Heard of Wolfgang Iser. In: Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (eds.):
Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press 2004, 11-26.
Blackmur 1951
R. P. Blackmur: The Lion and the Honeycomb. In: The Hudson Review
3:4 (1951), 487-507.
Blaim and Gruszweska 1994
Artur Blaim and Ludmila Gruszweska: Implied Authors, Implied Readers,
Implied Texts: A Modest Proposal. In: Grazyna Bystydzienska et al. (eds.):
Focus on Literature and Culture. Papers from the 2nd Conference of the
Polish Association for the Study of English. Lublin: Maria Curie-Skáo-
dowska UP 1994, 145-155.
Bode 1995
Christoph Bode: Art. The Rhetoric of Fiction. In: Renner and Habekost
1995, 333-335.
Booth 1952
Wayne C. Booth: The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before
Tristram Shandy. In: PMLA 67 (1952), 163-185.
Booth 1961
Wayne C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago UP 1961.
Booth 1967
Wayne C. Booth: Introduction. In: Crane 1967, xiii-xxii.
Booth 1968
Wayne C. Booth: “The Rhetoric of Fiction” and the Poetics of Fictions. In:
Spilka 1977, 77-89.
Booth 1970
Wayne C. Booth: Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me. Essays and Ironies
for a Credulous Age. Chicago and London: Chicago UP 1970.
Booth 1974
Wayne C. Booth: A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: Chicago UP
1974.
Booth 1979
Wayne C. Booth: Critical Understanding. The Powers and Limits of Plu-
ralism. Chicago and London: Chicago UP 1979.
Booth 1982
Wayne C. Booth: Between Two Generations: The Heritage of the Chicago
School. In: Profession 82 (1982), 19-26.
188 Works Cited
Booth 1983a
Wayne C. Booth: Afterword to the Second Edition: The Rhetoric in Fiction
and Fiction as Rhetoric: Twenty-One Years Later. In: W. C. B.: The Rhe-
toric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: Chicago UP 1983, 399-457.
Booth 1983b
Wayne C. Booth: Rhetorical Critics Old and New. The Case of Gerard
Genette. In: Lerner 1983, 123-141.
Booth 1988
Wayne C. Booth: The Company We Keep. Ethical Criticism and the Ethics
of Reading. Berkeley: California UP 1988.
Booth 1995
Wayne C. Booth: Afterword: Let Us All Mount Our Good Chargers,
Whatever Their Names, and Gallop Off Joyfully in All Directions, a Mys-
teriously United Company Serving the Empress of All the Sciences, Rhe-
toric. In: Antczak 1995a, 279-308.
Booth 1996
Wayne C. Booth: Where is the Authorial Audience in Biblical Narrative –
and in other ‘Authoritative’ Texts? In: Narrative 4:3 (1996), 233-253.
Booth 1997
Wayne C. Booth: The Struggle To Tell the Story of the Struggle To Get
the Story Told. In: Narrative 5:1 (1997), 50-59.
Booth 1998a
Wayne C. Booth: Confessions of an Aging, Hypocritical Ex-Missionary.
In: Sunstone 21:1 (1998), 25-36.
<www.lds-mormon.com/booth.html>
Booth 1998b
Wayne C. Booth: The Ethics of Teaching Literature. In: College English
61:1 (1998), 41-55.
Booth 1998c
Wayne C. Booth: Why Banning Ethical Criticism Is a Serious Mistake. In:
Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998), 366-393.
Booth 2001a
Wayne C. Booth: Literary Criticism and the Pursuit of Character. In: Lit-
erature and Medicine 20:2 (2001), 97-108.
Booth 2001b
Wayne C. Booth: Letter to Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 25th of
October 2001.
Booth 2002
Wayne C. Booth: Is There an “Implied” Author in Every Film? In: College
Literatur 29:2 (2002), 124-131.
Booth 2004
Wayne C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. The Quest for Effective Com-
munication. Oxford: Blackwell 2004.
Works Cited 189
Booth 2005
Wayne C. Booth: Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother? In:
Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 75-88.
Booth et al. 1977
Wayne C. Booth et al.: In Defense of Authors and Readers. In: Novel. A
Forum on Fiction 11:1 (1977), 5-25.
Booth et al. 1980
Wayne C. Booth et al.: Interview: Wolfgang Iser. In: Diacritics 10:2
(1980), 57-74.
Bortolussi and Dixon 2003
Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon: Psychonarratology: Foundations for
the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
2003.
Bortolussi and Dixon 2004
Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi: Methods and Evidence in Psychonar-
ratology and the Theory of the Narrator: Reply to Diengott. In: Narrative
12:3 (2004), 317-325.
Bosonnet 1970
Felix R. Bosonnet: Anglo-amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft. In: Felix
Philipp Ingold (ed.): Literaturwissenschaft und Literarurkritik im 20. Jahr-
hundert. Bern: Kandelaber 1970, 35-84.
Brackert and Stückrath 1981
Helmut Brackert and Jörn Stuckrath (eds.): Literaturwissenschaft: Grund-
kurs. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1981.
Branigan 1992
Edward Branigan: Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge
1992.
Bremer 2002
Thomas Bremer: Schwerpunkt: Umberto Eco. Tübingen: Stauffenburg-
Verlag 2002.
Briggs 2002
Richard S. Briggs: The Implied Author and the Creation of the World. A
Test Case in Reader-Response Criticism. In: The Expository Times 113:8
(2002), 264-269.
Briosi 1986
Sandro Briosi: La narratologie et la question de l’auteur. In: Poetique 17
(1986), 507-519.
Bronzwaer 1978
Wilhelmus J. M. Bronzwaer: Implied Author, Extradiegetic Narrator and
Public Reader. Gerard Genette’s Narratological Model and the Reading
Version of Great Expectations. In: Neophilologus 62 (1978), 1-18.
Bronzwaer 1981
Wilhelmus J. M. Bronzwaer: Mieke Bal’s Concept of Focalization: A Cri-
tical Note. In: Poetics Today 2:2 (1981), 193–201.
190 Works Cited
Brooks 1947
Cleanth Brooks: The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Po-
etry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, World 1947.
Brubacher and Rudy 1997
John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy: Higher Education in Transition. A
History of American Colleges and Universities. 4th ed. New Brunswick and
London: Transaction Publishers 1997.
Bühler 2003
Axel Bühler: Interpretieren – Vielfalt oder Einheit? In: Jannidis et al. 2003,
169-181.
Burkhardt and Rohse 1991
Armin Burkhardt and Eberhard Rohse (eds.): Umberto Eco: Zwischen Li-
teratur und Semiotik. Braunschweig: Ars et scientia 1991.
Burdorf 1997
Dieter Burdorf: Einführung in die Gedichtanalyse. Stuttgart and Weimar:
Metzler 1997.
Burke 1943
Kenneth Burke: The Problem of the Intrinsic (as Reflected by the Neo-Ar-
istotelian School). In: Accent. A Quarterly of New Literature 3:2 (1943),
80-94.
Burke 1992
Seán Burke: The Death and Return of the Author. Criticism and Subjectiv-
ity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 1992.
Busch 1998
Dagmar Busch: Unreliable Narration aus narratologischer Sicht: Bau-
steine für ein erzähltheoretisches Analyseraster. In: Nünning 1998a, 41-58.
Carlshamre and Petterson 2003
Staffan Carlshamre and Anders Petterson: Types of Interpretation in the
Aesthetic Disciplines. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s UP 2003.
Carnap 1950
Rudolf Carnap: Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago: Chicago UP
1950.
Capozzi 1997a
Rocco Capozzi (ed.): Reading Eco: An Anthology. Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana UP 1997.
Capozzi 1997b
Rocco Capozzi: Interpretation and Overinterpretation: The Rights of
Texts, Readers and Implied Authors. In: Capozzi 1997a, 217-234, 417-
420.
Carroll 1992
Noël Carroll: Art, Intention, and Conversation. In: Iseminger 1992a, 97-
131.
Works Cited 191
Carroll 1993
Noël Carroll: Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism:
Intention and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. In: JAAC 51:2 (1993), 254-
252.
Carroll 1997
Noël Carroll: The Intentional Fallacy: Defending Myself. In: JAAC 55:3
(1997), 305-309.
Carroll 2000a
Noël Carroll: Interpretation and Intention: The Debate between Hypotheti-
cal and Actual Intentionalism. In: Metaphilosophy 31:1/2 (2000), 76-95.
Carroll 2000b
Noël Carroll: Introduction. In: Noël Carroll (ed.): Theories of Art Today.
Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press 2000, 3-24.
Carroll 2002
Noël Carroll: Andy Kaufman and the Philosophy of Interpretation. In:
Krausz 2002, 320-344.
Cascardi 1987
Anthony J. Cascardi: Literature and the Question of Philosophy. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins UP 1987.
Chatman 1969
Seymour Chatman: New Ways of Analyzing Narrative Structure. In: Lan-
guage and Style 2 (1969), 3-36.
Chatman 1971
Seymour Chatman: The Structure of Fiction. In: University Review 37
(1971), 190-214.
Chatman 1975
Seymour Chatman: The Structure of Narrative Transmission. In: Roger
Fowler (ed.): Style and Structure in Literature. Essays in New Stylistics.
Ithaca and New York: Cornell UP 1975, 213-257.
Chatman 1978
Seymour Chatman: Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP 1978.
Chatman 1988
Seymour Chatman: On Deconstructing Narratology. In: Style 22:1 (1988),
9-17.
Chatman 1990a
Seymour Chatman: Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction
and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP 1990.
Chatman 1990b
Seymour Chatman: What Can We Learn from a Contextualist Narratol-
ogy? In: Poetics Today 11:2 (1990), 309-328.
Christadler 1963
Martin Christadler: Review Booth 1961. In: Germanistik 4 (1963), 37.
192 Works Cited
Christmann and Schreier 2003

Ursula Christmann and Margit Schreier: Kognitionspsychologie der Text-
verarbeitung und Konsequenzen für die Bedeutungskonstitution literari-
scher Texte. In: Jannidis et al. 2003, 246-285.
Cohn 2000
Dorrit Cohn: Discordant Narration. In: Style 34:2 (2000), 307-316.
Comstock 1984
Gary Comstock: Wayne C. Booth, Pluralist. In: Religious Studies Review
10 (1984), 252-257.
Coney 1984
Mary B. Coney: The Implied Author in Technical Discourse. In: Journal of
Advanced Composition 5 (1984), 163-172.
<http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/5.l/Articles/14.htm>
Corman 1994
Brian Corman: Chicago Critics. In: Groden and Kreiswirth 1994, 143-145.
Cornils and Schernus 2003
Anja Cornils and Wilhelm Schernus: On the Relationsship between the
Theory of the Novel, Narrative Theory, and Narratology. In: Kindt and
Müller 2003a, 137-174.
Crane 1935
Ronald S. Crane: History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature. In:
Crane 1967, 2, 3-24.
Crane 1947/48
Ronald S. Crane: Cleanth Brooks; Or, the Bancruptcy of Critical Monism.
In: Modern Philology 45 (1947/48), 226-245.
Crane 1952a
Ronald S. Crane: Introduction. In: Crane et al. 1952, 1-24.
Crane 1952b
Ronald S. Crane: The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones. In: Crane
et al. 1952, 616-647.
Crane 1953a
Ronald S. Crane: The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.
Toronto: Toronto UP 1953.
Crane 1953b
Ronald S. Crane: A Reply to Mr. Johnson. In: JAAC 12 (1953), 257-265.
Crane 1957
Ronald S. Crane: Preface. In: Crane et al. 1957, III-VI.
Crane 1967
Ronald S. Crane: The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical or
Historical. 2 vol. Chicago and London: Chicago UP 1967.
Crane et al. 1942
Ronald S. Crane et al.: Two Essays in Practical Criticism. In: University
Review 8 (1942), 199-219.
Works Cited 193
Crane et al. 1952
Ronald S. Crane et al.: Critics and Criticism. Ancient and Modern. Chi-
cago and London: Chicago UP 1952.
Crane et al. 1957
Ronald S. Crane et al.: Critics and Criticism: Essays in Method. Abridged
ed. Chicago and London: Chicago UP 1957.
Currie 1990
Gregory Currie: The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge UP 1990.
Currie 1991
Gregory Currie: Work and Text. In: Mind 100:399 (1991), 325-340.
Currie 1993
Gregory Currie: Interpretation and Objectivity. In: Mind 102:405 (1993),
413-428.
Currie 1995
Gregory Currie: Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film.
In: JAAC 53 (1995), 19-29.
Currie 2003
Gregory Currie: Interpretation in Art. In: Levinson 2003, 291-306.
Currie 2004a
Gregory Currie: Interpretation and Pragmatics. In: G. C.: Arts and Minds.
Oxford: Oxford UP 2004, 107-133.
Currie 2004b
Gregory Currie: Interpreting the Unreliable. In: G. C.: Arts and Minds. Ox-
ford: Oxford UP 2004, 134-152.
Danneberg 1989a
Lutz Danneberg: Methodologie: Struktur, Aufbau und Evaluation. Berlin:
Duncker & Humblot 1989 (Erfahrung und Denken 71).
Danneberg 1989b
Lutz Danneberg: Zwischen Innovation und Tradition: Begriffsbildung und
Begriffsentwicklung als Explikation. In: Wagenknecht 1989, 50-68.
Danneberg 1990
Lutz Danneberg: Interpretation: Kontextbildung und Kontextverwendung.
Demonstriert an Brechts Keuner-Geschichte “Die Frage, ob es einen Gott
gibt”. In: SPIEL 9 (1990), 89-130.
Danneberg 1991
Lutz Danneberg: Zur Explikation von Epochenbegriffen. In: Klaus Garber
(ed.): Europäische Barock-Rezeption. 2 vol. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
1991, vol. 1, 85-93.
Danneberg 1996
Lutz Danneberg: Beschreibungen in den textinterpretierenden Wissen-
schaften. In: Rüdiger Inhetveen and Rudolf Kötter (eds.): Betrachten –
Beobachten – Beschreiben. Beschreibungen in Kultur- und Naturwissen-
schaften. München: Fink 1996, 193-224.
194 Works Cited
Danneberg 1999
Lutz Danneberg: Zum Autorkonstrukt und zu einem methodologischen
Konzept der Autorintention. In: Jannidis et al. 1999, 77-105.
Danneberg 2000
Lutz Danneberg: Art. Kontext. In: Harald Fricke (ed.): Reallexikon der
deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Bd. 2. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter
2000, 333-336.
Danneberg and Müller 1981
Lutz Danneberg and Hans-Harald Müller: Probleme der Textinterpretation.
Analytische Rekonstruktion und Versuch einer konzeptionellen Lösung.
In: Kodikas/Code 3:2 (1981), 133-168.
Danneberg and Müller 1983
Lutz Danneberg and Hans-Harald Müller: Der “intentionale Fehlschluß” –
ein Dogma? Systematischer Forschungsbericht zur Kontroverse um eine
intentionalistische Konzeption in den Textwissenschaften. In: ZfaW 14
(1983), 103-137, 376-411.
Danneberg and Müller 1984a
Lutz Danneberg and Hans-Harald Müller: Wissenschaftstheorie, Herme-
neutik, Literaturwissenschaft. Anmerkungen zu einem unterbliebenen und
Beiträge zu einem künftigen Dialog über die Methodologie des Verste-
hens. In: DVjs 58 (1984), 177-237.
Danneberg and Müller 1984b
Lutz Danneberg and Hans-Harald Müller: On Justifying the Choice of
Interpretive Theories. A Critical Examination of E. D. Hirsch’s Arguments
in Favor of an Intentionalist Theory of Interpretation. In: JAAC 43 (1984),
7-16.
Darby 2001
David Darby: Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Narratology.
In: Poetics Today 22 (2001), 829-852.
Darby 2003
David Darby: Form and Context Revisited. In: Poetics Today 24 (2003),
423-437.
Davies 1996
David Davies: Fictional Truth and Fictional Authors. In: BJA 36:1 (1996),
43-55.
Davies 2006
David Davies: Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell 2006 (New Direc-
tions in Aesthetics).
DeReuck 1990a
Jenny DeReuck: Etching “Inconscience”: Unreliability as a Function in
Narrative Situations. In: Journal of Literary Studies 6 (1990), 289-303.
DeReuck 1990b
Jenny DeReuck: Stereoscopic Perspectives: Transmission and Reception in
Unreliable Homodiegetic Narration. In: AUMLA. Journal of the Austral-
Works Cited 195
asian Universities Language and Literature Association 74 (1990), 154-
168.
Detering 2002
Heinrich Detering (ed.): Autorschaft. Positionen und Revisionen. Stuttgart
and Weimar: Metzler 2002 (Germanistische Symposien 24).
Dickie 1997
George Dickie: Reply to Carroll. In: JAAC 55 (1997), 311-312.
Dickie 2006
George Dickie: Intentions: Conversations and Art. In: BJA 46:1 (2006),
70-81.
Dickie and Wilson 1995
George Dickie and W. Kent Wilson: The Intentional Fallacy: Defending
Beardsley. In: JAAC 53:3 (1995), 233-250.
Diengott 1986/87
Nilli Diengott: Goriot vs. Vautrin: A Problem in the Reconstruction of Le
Père Goriot’s System of Values. In: Nineteenth-Century French Studies 15
(1986/87), 70-76.
Diengott 1988
Nilli Diengott: Narratology and Feminism. In: Style 22 (1988), 42-51.
Diengott 1990
Nilli Diengott: Reliability in Narrative: Some Theoretical Issues. In: Lan-
guage and Style 23 (1990), 369-378.
Diengott 1993a
Nilli Diengott: Implied Author, Motivation and Theme and Their Problem-
atic Status. In: Orbis Litterarum 48 (1993), 181-193.
Diengott 1993b
Nilli Diengott: The Implied Author Once Again. In: JLS 22:1 (1993), 68-
75.
Diengott 1995
Nilli Diengott: Narration and Focalization – the Implications for the Issue
of Reliability in Narrative. In: JLS 24:1 (1995), 42-49.
Diengott 2004
Nilli Diengott: Some Problems with the Concept of the Narrator in Bor-
tolussi and Dixon’s Psychonarratology. In: Narrative 12:3 (2004), 306-
316.
Dietrichson 1963
Jan Dietrichson: The Criticism of Ronald S. Crane. In: Edda 63 (1963), 85-
117.
Dosse 1991
François Dosse: Geschichte des Strukturalismus. 2 vol. [vol 1: Das Feld
des Zeichens 1945-1966; vol. 2: Die Zeichen der Zeit 1967-1991]. Transl.
by Stefan Barmann. Hamburg: Junius 1996/97.
196 Works Cited
Dutton 1987
Denis Dutton: Why Intentionalism Won’t Go Away. In: Cascardi 1987,
194-210.
Eco 1962
Umberto Eco: Opera aperta. Milan: Bompiani 1962.
Eco 1968
Umberto Eco: La struttura assente. Milan: Bompiani 1968.
Eco 1976
Umberto Eco: A Theory of Semiotics. Critical Social Studies. Blooming-
ton: Indiana UP 1976.
Eco 1979a
Umberto Eco: Lector in fabula. La coperazione interpretativa nei test nar-
rativi. Milan: Bompiani 1979.
Eco 1979b
Umberto Eco: The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of
Texts. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP 1979.
Eco 1989
Umberto Eco: The Open Work. Trans. By Anna Cancogni, intro. by David
Robey. Cambridge: Harvard UP 1989.
Eco 1990a
Umberto Eco: I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milan: Bompiani 1990.
Eco 1990b
Umberto Eco: The Limits of Interpretation. Advances in Semiotics.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP 1990.
Eco 1992a
Umberto Eco (with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-
Rose): Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Ed. by Stefan Collini. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP 1992.
Eco 1992b
Umberto Eco: Reading My Readers. In: MLN 107 (1992), 819-827.
Eco 1994
Umberto Eco: Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, Mass. and
London: Harvard UP 1994.
Erzgräber 1970
Willi Erzgräber (ed.): Moderne englische und amerikanische Literaturkri-
tik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1970.
Ewen 1974
Joseph Ewen: Writer, Narrator, and Implied Author. In: Hasifrut 5: 18/19
(1974), VII-IX.
Fieguth 1973
Rolf Fieguth: Zur Rezeptionslenkung bei narrativen und dramatischen
Werken. In: Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 47 (1973), 186-201.
Works Cited 197
Finke 1982
Peter Finke: Konstruktiver Funktionalismus. Die wissenschaftstheoretische
Basis einer empirischen Theorie der Literatur. Braunschweig: Vieweg
1982.
Fish 1981
Stanley Fish: Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser. In: Diacritics 11:1
(1981), 2-13.
Fludernik 2000
Monika Fludernik: Beyond Structuralism in Narratology: Recent Devel-
opments and New Horizons in Narrative Theory. In: Anglistik 11 (2000),
83-96.
Fludernik 2005
Monika Fludernik: Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism
to the Present. In: Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 36-59.
Foucault 1969
Michel Foucault: What Is an Author? In: David Lodge and Nigel Wood
(eds.): Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Harlow: Longman
2000, 174-187.
Fricke 2000
Harald Fricke: Begriffsgeschichte und Explikation in der Literaturwissen-
schaft. In: Scholtz 2000, 67-72.
Füger 1974
Wilhelm Füger: Zur Tiefenstruktur des Narrativen. Prolegomena zu einer
generativen Grammatik des Erzählens. In: Poetica 5 (1972), 268-292.
Geiger 1993
Roger Geiger: Research, Graduate Education, and the Ecology of Ameri-
can Universities: An Interpretive History. In: Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn
Wittrock (eds.): The European and American University since 1800. His-
torical and Sociological Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1993, 234-
259.
Genette 1972
Gérard Genette: Discours du récit. Essai de méthode. In: G. G.: Figures III.
Paris: Seuil 1972, 65-292.
Genette 1980
Gérard Genette: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca and
New York: Cornell UP 1980.
Genette 1983
Gérard Genette: Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil 1983.
Genette 1988
Gérard Genette: Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca and New York:
Cornell UP 1988.
Genette 1990
Gérard Genette: Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative. In: Poetics Today
11 (1990), 755-774.
198 Works Cited
Gibson 1950
Walker Gibson: Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers. In: Col-
lege English 11 (1950), 265-269.
Glicksberg 1951
Charles I. Glicksberg (ed.): American Literary Criticism: 1900-1950. New
York: Hendricks House 1951.
Goebel 1999
Eckart Goebel: Stationen der Erzählforschung in der Literaturwissenschaft.
In: Eberhard Lämmert (ed.): Die erzählerische Dimension. Eine Gemein-
samkeit der Künste. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1999, 4-33.
Goldsmith 1979
Arnold L. Goldsmith: American Literary Criticism: 1905-1965. Boston:
Twayne Publishers 1979.
Goldman 1990
Alan A. Goldman: Interpreting Art and Literature. In: JAAC 48 (1990),
205-214.
Gomel 2004
Elana Gomel: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the
(Un)Death of the Author. In: Narrative 12:1 (2004), 74-92.
Graff 1987
Gerald Graff: Professing Literature. An Institutional History. Chicago and
London: Chicago UP 1987.
Groeben 1982
Norbert Groeben: Leserpsychologie: Textverständnis – Textverständlich-
keit. Münster: Aschendorff 1982.
Groden and Kreiswirth 1994
Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (eds.): The Johns Hopkins Guide
to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP 1994.
Grünzweig and Solbach 1999
Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (eds.): Grenzüberschreitungen:
Narratologie im Kontext. Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Con-
text. Tübingen: Narr 1999.
Guerin et al. 1992
Wilfred L. Guerin et al. (eds.) : A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Lit-
erature. 3rd ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP 1992.
Gumbrecht 1975
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Konsequenzen der Rezeptionsästhetik oder Lite-
raturwissenschaft als Kommunikationssoziologie. In: Poetica 7 (1975),
388-413.
Hale 1998
Dorothy J. Hale: Social Formalism. The Novel in Theory from Henry
James to the Present. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP 1998.
Works Cited 199
Hass and König 2003
Ulrike Haß and Christoph König (eds.): Literaturwissenschaft und Linguis-
tik von 1960 bis heute. Göttingen: Wallstein 2003 (Marbacher Wissen-
schaftsgeschichte 4).
Hehir 1963/64
Diana O. Hehir: Review Booth 1961. In: JAAC 22 (1963/64), 487-488.
Heinen 2002
Sandra Heinen: Das Bild des Autors. Überlegungen zum Begriff des “im-
pliziten Autors” und seines Potentials zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Be-
schreibung von inszenierter Autorschaft. In: Sprachkunst 33 (2002), 329-
345.
Heinen 2006
Sandra Heinen: Literarische Inszenierung von Autorschaft. Geschlechts-
spezifische Autorschaftsmodelle in der englischen Romantik. Trier: WVT
2006 (ELCH – Studies in English Literary and Cultural History 17).
Hempfer 1977
Klaus W. Hempfer: Zur pragmatischen Fundierung der Texttypologie. In:
Walter Hinck (ed.): Textsortenlehre – Gattungsgeschichte. Heidelberg:
Winter 1977, 1-26.
Herman 1999
David Herman (ed.): Narratologies: New Perspectives in Narrative Analy-
sis. Columbus: Ohio State UP 1999.
Herman 2005
David Herman: Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Genealogy of Early
Developments. In: Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 19-35.
Herman et al. 2005
David Herman et al. (eds.): Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.
London: Routledge 2005.
Hermerén 1983
Göran Hermerén: Interpretation. Types and Criteria. In: Grazer Philoso-
phische Studien 19 (1983), 131-161.
Hirsch 1967
Eric Donald Hirsch: Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP 1967
Hirsch 1976
Eric Donald Hirsch: The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: Chicago UP
1976.
Hirsch 1983
Eric Donald Hirsch: The Politics of Interpretation. In: W. J. T. Mitchell
(ed.): The Politics of Interpretation. Chicago and London: Chicago UP
1983, 321-333.
Hirsch 1984
Eric Donald Hirsch: Criticism and Countertheses. On Justifying Interpre-
tive Norms. In: JAAC 43 (1984), 89-91.
200 Works Cited
Hix 1990
H. L. Hix: Morte d’Author. An Autopsy. Philadelphia: Temple UP 1990.
Hof 1980
Renate Hof: Das Spiel des “unreliable narrator” in Nabokovs Lolita. In:
Amerikastudien 25:4 (1980), 418-431.
Hof 1984
Renate Hof: Das Spiel des “unreliable narrator”. Aspekte unglaubwürdigen
Erzählens im Werk von Vladimir Nabokov. München: Fink 1984 (Ameri-
can Studies 59).
Holub 1984
Robert C. Holub: Reception Theory. A Critical Introduction. London and
New York: Methuen 1984.
Hrushovsky 1976
Benjamin Hrushovsky: Poetics, Criticism, Science: Remarks on the Fields
and Responsibilities of the Study of Literature. In: PTL. A Journal for De-
scriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976), iii-xxxv.
Hühn and Schönert 2002
Peter Hühn and Jörg Schönert: Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik.
In: Poetica 34 (2002), 287-305.
Ibler 2004
Reinhard Ibler: Literarische Kommunikation und (Nicht-)Intentionalität.
In: Lazar Fleishman et al. (ed.): Analysieren als Deuten. Wolf Schmid zum
60. Geburtstag. Hamburg: Hamburg UP 2004, 67-84.
Ingarden 1931
Roman Ingarden: The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Bor-
derlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Evanston: North-
western UP 1973.
Ingarden 1936
Roman Ingarden: The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Evanston:
Northwestern UP 1979.
Irwin 2002
William Irwin: Intentionalism and Author Constructs. In: W. I. (ed.): The
Death and Resurrection of the Author, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press
2002, 191-203
Iseminger 1992a
Gary Iseminger (ed.): Intention and Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple
UP 1992.
Iseminger 1992b
Gary Iseminger: An Intentional Demonstration. In: Iseminger 1992a, 76-
96.
Iseminger 1996
Gary Iseminger: Actual Intentionalism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism. In:
JAAC 54:4 (1996), 319-326.
Works Cited 201
Iseminger 1998
Gary Iseminger: Interpretive Relevance, Contradiction and Compatibility
with the Text: A Rejoinder to Knight. In: JAAC 56 (1998), 58-61.
Iser 1968
Wolfgang Iser: Der Leser als Kompositionselement im realistischen Ro-
man. Wirkungsästhetische Betrachtung zu Thackerays Vanity Fair. In:
Bernhard Fabian and Ulrich Suerbaum (eds.): Festschrift für Edgar Mert-
ner. München: Fink 1968, 273-292.
Iser 1970
Wolfgang Iser: Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wir-
kungsbedingung literarischer Prosa. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag 1970.
Iser 1971
Wolfgang Iser: Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction.
In: J. Hillis Miller (ed.): Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the
English Institute. New York and London: Columbia UP 1971, 1-45.
Iser 1972
Wolfgang Iser: Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans
von Bunyan bis Beckett. München: Fink 1972.
Iser 1974
Wolfgang Iser: The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose
Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
UP 1974.
Iser 1975
Wolfgang Iser: Im Lichte der Kritik. In: Warning 1975, 325-342.
Iser 1976
Wolfgang Iser: Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Mün-
chen: Fink 1976.
Iser 1978
Wolfgang Iser: The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978.
Iser 1981
Wolfgang Iser: Talk Like Whales: A Reply to Stanley Fish. In: Diacritics
11:3 (1981), 82-87.
Iser 1983
Wolfgang Iser: Akte des Fingierens oder Was ist das Fiktive im fiktionalen
Text? In: Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (eds.): Funktionen des Fikti-
ven. München: Fink 1983 (Poetik und Hermeneutik 10), 121-151.
Iser 1984
Wolfgang Iser. Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. 2nd ed.
München: Fink 1984.
Iser 1991
Wolfgang Iser: Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer
Anthropologie. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1991.
202 Works Cited
Iser 2006
Wolfgang Iser: How to Do Theory. Oxford: Blackwell 2006 (How to Stu-
dy Literature 1).
Jahn 1995
Manfred Jahn: Narratologie: Methoden und Modelle der Erzähltheorie. In:
Ansgar Nünning 1995, 29-50
Jahn 1998
Manfred Jahn: Package Deals, Exklusionen, Randzonen: das Phänomen
der Unverläßlichkeit in der Erzählsituation. In: Nünning 1998a, 81-106.
Jahn and Nünning 1994
Manfred Jahn and Ansgar Nünning: A Survey of Narratological Models.
In: LWU 27 (1994), 283-303.
Jahraus 1994
Oliver Jahraus: Analyse und Interpretation. Zu Grenzen und Grenzüber-
schreitungen im struktural-literaturwissenschaftlichen Theorienkonzept.
In: IASL 19:2 (1994), 1-51.
Janik 1973
Dieter Janik: Die Kommunikationsstruktur des Erzählwerks. Ein semiolo-
gisches Modell. Bebenhausen: Rotsch 1973 (Thesen und Analysen 3).
Jannidis 1999
Fotis Jannidis: Der nützliche Autor. Möglichkeiten eines Begriffs zwi-
schen Text und historischem Kontext In: Jannidis et al. 1999, 353-389.
Jannidis 2000
Fotis Jannidis: Art. Intention. In: Harald Fricke et al. (ed.): Reallexikon der
2000, 160-162.
Jannidis 2002
Fotis Jannidis: Zwischen Autor und Erzähler. In: Detering 2002, 540-556.
Jannidis 2004
Fotis Jannidis: Figur und Person. Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratolo-
gie. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 2004 (Narratologia 3).
Jannidis et al. 1999
Fotis Jannidis et al. (eds.): Rückkehr des Autors. Zur Erneuerung eines
umstrittenen Begriffs. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1999 (Studien und Texte zur
Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 71).
Jannidis et al. 2003
Fotis Jannidis et al. (eds.): Regeln der Bedeutung. Berlin and New York:
de Gruyter 2003 (Revisionen – Grundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie 1).
Johnson 1953a
S. F. Johnson: “Critics and Criticism”. A Discussion. The Chicago Mani-
festo. In: JAAC 12 (1953), 248-257.
Johnson 1953b
S. F. Johnson: A Conterstatement. In: JAAC 12 (1953), 265-267.
Works Cited 203
Johnstone 1995
Monica Johnstone: Wayne Booth and the Ethics of Fiction. In: Antczak
1995a, 59-70.
Juhl 1980a
Peter D. Juhl: Life, Literature, and the Implied Author. In: DVjs 54 (1980),
177-203.
Juhl 1980b
Peter D. Juhl: Interpretation. An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criti-
cism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1980.
Kahrmann et al. 1977
Cordula Kahrmann et al.: Einführung in die Analyse von Erzähltexten.
Kronberg: Athenäum 1977.
Keast 1952
William R. Keast: Ronald S. Crane, Editor of Modern Philology, 1930-52.
In: Modern Philology 50:l (1952), 1-4.
Kiefer 2005
Alex Kiefer: The Intentional Model in Interpretation. In: JAAC 63 (2005),
271-281.
Kieran 2006
Matthew Kieran (ed.): Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Phi-
losophy of Art. Oxford: Blackwell 2006.
Killham 1966
John Killham: The ‘Second Self in Novel’ Criticism. In: BJA 6 (1966),
272-290.
Kindt 2003
Tom Kindt: Die Quadratur des Typenkreises. Franz K. Stanzels Überle-
gungen zu einer Erzähltheorie für Leser (Review Stanzel 2002). In: IASL –
online (update, 26.3.2003).
<www.iasl.uni-muenchen.de>
Kindt 2004
Tom Kindt: “Erzählerische Unzuverlässigkeit” in Literatur und Film.
Überlegungen zu einem Begriff zwischen Narratologie und Interpreta-
tionstheorie. In: Herbert Hrachovec et al. (eds.): Kleine Erzählungen und
ihre Medien. Wien: Turia und Kant 2004, 55-66.
Kindt 2005
Tom Kindt: L’art de violer le contrat. Une comparaison entre la métalepse
et la non-fiabilité narrative. In: John Pier and Jean Marie Schaeffer (eds.):
Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de représentation. Paris: Édition de l’Ehess
2005 (Recherches d’histoire et de sciences sociales 108), 167-178.
Kindt and Müller 1999
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller: Der “implizite Autor”. Zur Explika-
tion und Verwendung eines umstrittenen Begriffs. In: Jannidis et al. 1999,
273-287.
204 Works Cited

Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.): Ecos Echos. Das Werk Um-
berto Ecos: Dimensionen, Rezeptionen, Kritiken. München: Fink 2000.
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller: Was war eigentlich der Biographis-
mus – und was ist aus ihm geworden? Eine Untersuchung. In: Detering
2002, 355-375.
Kindt and Müller 2003a
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (eds.): What Is Narratology? Ques-
tions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin and New
York: de Gruyter 2003 (Narratologia 1).
Kindt and Müller 2003b
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller: Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of
Interpretation. In: Kindt and Müller 2003a, 205-220.
Kindt and Müller 2003c
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller: Narratology and Interpretation: A Re-
joinder to David Darby. In: Poetics Today 24:3 (2003), 413-421.
Kindt and Müller 2003d
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller: Wieviel Interpretation enthalten Be-
schreibungen? Überlegungen zu einer umstrittenen Unterscheidung am
Beispiel der Narratologie. In: Jannidis et al. 2003, 296-304.
Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller: Nationalphilologie und “Verglei-
chende Literaturgeschichte” zwischen 1890 und 1910. Eine Fallstudie zur
Konzeption der Wissenschaftshistoriographie der Germanistik. In: Lutz
Danneberg et al. (eds.): Stil, Schule, Disziplin. Analyse und Erprobung
von Konzepten wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Rekonstruktion. Frank-
furt/M.: Lang 2005 (Berliner Beiträge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 8),
335-361.
Kirby 1992
John T. Kirby: Toward a Rhetoric of Poetics: Rhetor as Author and Nar-
rator. In: JNT 22:1 (1992), 1-22.
Klausnitzer 2004
Ralf Klausnitzer: Literaturwissenschaft. Begriffe – Verfahren – Arbeits-
techniken. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 2004.
Knight 1979
Karl F. Knight: The Implied Author in Melville’s Pierre. In: Studies in
American Fiction 7 (1979), 163-174.
Kolk 1997
Rainer Kolk: “Repräsentative Theorie”. Institutionengeschichtliche Beo-
bachtungen zur Geistesgeshichte. In: Petra Boden and Holger Dainat
(eds.): Atta Troll tanzt noch. Selbstbesichtigungen der literaturwissen-
schaftlichen Germanistik im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie Verlag
1997, 81-101.
Works Cited 205
Krausz 2002
Michael Krausz (ed.): Is There a Single Right Interpretation? University
Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State UP 2002.
Kummer 1976
Emanuel Kummer: Wayne C. Booth et l’auteur implicite de Voyage. In:
Australian Journal of French Studies 13 (1976), 18-24.
Kummer and Schmitz 1976
Emanuel Kummer and P. F. Schmitz: The Rhetoric of Fiction van Wayne
C. Booth in de praktijk. In: Forum der letteren 17 (1976), 31-45.
Lämmert 1955
Eberhard Lämmert: Bauformen des Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler 1955.
Lamarque 1996
Peter Lamarque: The Death of the Author. An Analytical Autopsy In: P.
L.:. Fictional Points of View. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP 1996, 166-
180.
Lamarque 2000
Peter Lamarque: The British Journal of Aesthetics: Forty Years on. In:
BJA 40:1 (2000), 1-20.
Lamarque 2002
Peter Lamarque: Appreciation and Literary Interpretation. In: Krausz 2002,
285-306.
Lamarque 2004
Peter Lamarque: Reflections on Current Trends in Aesthetics. In: Post-
graduate Journal of Aesthetics 1:1 (2004), 1-9.
Lanser 1981
Susan S. Lanser: The Narrative Act. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1981.
Lanser 1986
Susan S. Lanser: Toward a Feminist Narratology. In: Style 20 (1986), 341-
363.
Lanser 1988
Susan S. Lanser: Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology. In:
Style 22 (1988), 52-60.
Lanser 2001
Susan S. Lanser: (Im)plying the Author. In: Narrative 9 (2001), 153-160.
Lanser 2005
Susan S. Lanser: The “I” of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the
Limits of Structuralist Narratology. In: Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 206-
219.
Larsson 2002
Donald F. Larsson: Every Picture Tells a Story: Agency and Narration in
Film Panel: Movies as Paradigmatic Narratives. In: URL (24.7.2002).
<http://www.english.mnsu.edu/larsson/agency.html>
206 Works Cited
Leitch 1988
Vinvent B. Leitch: American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the
Eighties. New York: Columbia UP 1988.
Lerner 1983
Laurence Lerner: Reconstructing Literature. Oxford: Blackwell 1983.
Levinson 1992
Jerrold Levinson: Intention and Interpretation: A Last Look. In: Iseminger
1992a, 221-256.
Levinson 1996a
Jerrold Levinson: Intention and Interpretation in Literature. In: J. L.: The
Pleasures of Aesthetics. Philosophical Essays. Ithaca and London: Cornell
UP 1996, 175-213.
Levinson 1996b
Jerrold Levinson: Messages in Art. In: J. L.: The Pleasures of Aesthetics.
Philosophical Essays. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP 1996, 224-241.
Levinson 2002
Jerrold Levinson: Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and
Replies. In: Krausz 2002, 309-318.
Levinson 2003
Jerrold Levinson (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford: Ox-
ford UP 2003.
Link 1973
Hannelore Link: “Die Appellstruktur der Texte” und ein ‘Paradigmen-
wechsel in der Literaturwissenschaft’. In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-
gesellschaft 17 (1973), 532-583.
Link 1976
Hannelore Link: Rezeptionsforschung. Eine Einführung in ihre Methoden
und Probleme. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1976.
Lintott 2002
Sheila Lintott: When Artists Fail: A Reply to Trivedi. In: BJA 42:1 (2002),
64-72.
Lipking and Litz 1972.
Lawrence L. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (eds.): Modern Literary Criticism
1900-1970. New York: Atheneum 1972.
Livingston 1996
Paisley Livingston: Arguing over Intentions. In: Revue Internationale de
Philosophie 198:4 (1996), 615-633.
Livingston 1998
Paisley Livingston: Intentionalism in Aesthetics. In: NLH 29 (1998), 831-
846.
Livingston 2003
Paisley Livingston: Intention in Art. In: Levinson 2003, 274-290.
Livingston 2005a
Paisley Livingston: Art and Intention. Oxford: Oxford UP 2005.
Works Cited 207
Livingston 2005b
Paisley Livingston: Texts, Works, Versions (with Reference to the Inten-
tions of Monsieur Pierre Menard). In: Livingston 2005a, 112-134.
Livingston 2005c
Paisley Livingston: Fiction and Fictional Truth. In: Livingston 2005a, 175-
207.
Lodge 1962
David Lodge: Review Booth 1961. In: The Modern Language Review 57
(1962), 580-581.
Lohner 1967
Edgar Lohner: Die Neu-Aristoteliker in Chicago. Einige grundsätzliche
Überlegungen zu Begriffen ihrer kritischen Theorie. In: Horst Meiler and
Hans Joachim Zimmermann (eds.): Lebendige Antike. Symposion für Ru-
dolf Sühnel. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag 1967, 528-541.
Long 1981
Maxine M. Long: To Good To Miss (Review Booth 1961). In: English
Journal (Oct., 1981), 67-68.
Lowes 1933
John Livingston Lowes: The Modern Language Association and Humane
Scholarship. In: PMLA 48 (1933), 1399-1488.
Ludwig 1982
Hans-Werner Ludwig (ed.): Arbeitsbuch Romananalyse. Tübingen: Narr
1982.
Lübbe 2003
Hermann Lübbe: Wortgebrauchspolitik. Zur Pragmatik der Wahl von Be-
griffsnamen. In: Carsten Dutt (ed.): Herausforderungen der Begriffsge-
schichte. Heidelberg: Winter 2003, 65-80.
Lyas 1992
Colin Lyas: Wittgensteinian Intentions. In. Iseminger 1992a, 132-151.
Maclean 1952
Norman Maclean: Episode, Speech, and Word. The Madness of Lear. In:
Crane et al. 1952, 595-615.
Maglioni et al. 1996
Joseph L. Maglioni et al.: A Taxonomy of Inference Categories that May
Be Generated during the Reading of Literary Texts. In: Roger J. Kreuz and
Mary Sue MacNealy (eds.): Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aes-
thetics. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publ. 1996, 201-220.
Mangels 1994
Annette Mangels: Zur Erzähltechnik im MahƗbhƗrata. Hamburg: Kovaþ
1994 (Poetica – Schriften zur Literaturwissenschaft 7).
Margolin 1981
Uri Margolin: On the ‘Vagueness’ of Critical Concepts. In: Poetics 10
(1981), 15-31.
208 Works Cited
Margolin 2003
Uri Margolin: Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narra-
tive. In: David Herman (ed.): Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sci-
ences. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP 2003, 271-294.
Margolis and Laurence 1999
Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds.): Concepts. Core Readings.
Cambridge and London: MIT Press 1999.
Margolis 1968
Joseph Margolis: Describing and Interpreting Works of Art. In: Francis J.
Coleman (ed.): Contemporary Studies in Aesthetics. New York: McGraw-
Hill 1968, 176-193.
Margolis 1989
Joseph Margolis: Reinterpreting Interpretation. In: JAAC 47 (1989), 237-
251.
Martin 1986
Wallace Martin: Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca and London: Cornell
UP 1986.
Martinez and Scheffel 1999
Matias Martinez and Michael Scheffel: Einführung in die Erzähltheorie.
München: Beck 1999.
Matthews 1977
Robert J. Matthews: Describing and Interpreting a Work of Art. In: JAAC
36 (1977), 5-14.
Mays 1962
Milton A. Mays: Review Booth 1961. In: Critique: Studies in Contempo-
rary Fiction 5:2 (1962), 84-90.
McKeon 1952a
Richard McKeon: Aristotle’s Conception of Language and the Arts of
Language. In: Crane et al. 1952, 176-231.
McKeon 1952b
Richard McKeon: The Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism. In: Crane et
al. 1952, 463-545.
McKeon 1982
Richard McKeon: Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago School of
Criticism. In: Profession 82 (1982), 1-18.
McKillop 1962/63
Alan D. McKillop: Review Booth 1961. In: Modern Philology 60:4
(1962/63), 295-298.
McKoon and Ratcliff 1992
Gail McKoon and Roger Ratcliff: Inference During Reading. In: Psychol-
ogical Review 99 (1992), 440-466.
Works Cited 209
Meister et al. 2005
Jan Christoph Meister et al. (eds.): Narratology beyond Literary Criticism:
Mediality – Disciplinarity. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2005 (Narra-
tologia 6)
Mersch 1993
Dieter Mersch: Umberto Eco zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius 1993.
Müller 1984
Hans-Harald Müller: Tendenzen der westdeutschen Literaturwissenschaft
nach 1965. Dargestellt an den Antworten auf die Probleme einer wissen-
schaftlichen Textinterpretation. In: LWU 15 (1984), 87-114.
Müller 1988
Hans-Harald Müller: Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Rezeptionsforschung.
Ein kritischer Essay über den vorerst (vorletzten) Versuch, die Literatur-
wissenschaft von Grund auf neu zu gestalten. In: Jörg Schönert and Harro
Segeberg (eds.): Polyperspektivik in der literarischen Moderne. Studien
zur Theorie, Geschichte und Wirkung der Literatur. Karl Robert Mandel-
kow gewidmet. Frankfurt/M.: Lang 1988 (Hamburger Beiträge zur Germa-
nistik 1), 452-479.
Müller 1989
Hans-Harald Müller: Probleme des Anwendungsbereichs eines Definiti-
onsprogramms in der Literaturwissenschaft. In: Wagenknecht 1989, 69-79.
Müller 1991a
Hans-Harald Müller: Zur Funktion und Bedeutung des ‘unzuverlässigen
Ich-Erzählers’ im Werk vom Ernst Weiß. In: Peter Engel and Hans-Harald
Müller (eds.): Ernst Weiß – Seelenanalytiker und Erzähler von europäi-
schem Rang. Beiträge zum Ersten Internationalen Ernst-Weiß-Symposium
aus Anlaß des 50. Todestages. Bern: Lang 1992, 186-196.
Müller 1991b
Hans-Harald Müller: Die Übertragung des Barockbegriffs von der Kunst-
wissenschaft auf die Literaturwissenschaft und ihre Konsequenzen bei
Fritz Strich und Oskar Walzel. In: Klaus Garber (ed.): Europäische Ba-
rock-Rezeption. 2 vol. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1991, vol. 1, 95-112.
Müller 2000
Hans-Harald Müller: Eco zwischen Autor und Text. Eine Kritik von Um-
berto Ecos Interpretationstheorie. In: Kindt and Müller 2000, 134-148.
Murphy 1995
Richard Murphy: Art. Der Akt des Lesens. In: Renner and Habekost 1995,
19-20.
Musarra 2002
Franco Musarra (ed.): Eco in Fabula. Umberto Eco nelle scienze umane.
Umberto Eco in the Humanities. Umberto Eco dans les sciences humaines.
Leuven: Leuven UP 2002 (Nuova serie 7).
210 Works Cited
Nathan 1982
Daniel O. Nathan: Irony and the Artist’s Intention. In: BJA 22:3 (1982),
245-257.
Nathan 1992
Daniel O. Nathan: Irony, Metaphor, and the Problem of Intention. In:
Iseminger 1992a, 183-203.
Nathan 2005
Daniel O. Nathan: A Paradox in Intentionalism. In: BJA 45:1 (2005), 32-
48.
Nathan 2006
Daniel O. Nathan: Art, Meaning, and Artist’s Meaning. In: Kieran 2006,
282-293.
Nehamas 1981
Alexander Nehamas: The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regu-
lative Ideal. In: Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 133-139.
Nehamas 1986
Alexander Nehamas: What an Author Is. In: Journal of Philosophy (1986),
685-691.
Nehamas 1987
Alexander Nehamas: Writer, Text, Work, Author. In: Cascardi 1987, 267-
291.
Nelles 1993
William Nelles: Historical and Implied Authors and Readers. In: Com-
parative Literature 45 (1993), 22-46.
Novitz 1982
David Novitz: Towards a Robust Realism. In: JAAC 41 (1982), 171-185.
Novitz 2002
David Novitz: Against Critical Pluralism. In Krausz 2002, 101-121.
Nünning 1989
Ansgar Nünning: Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells
der erzählerischen Vermittlung: Die Funktion der Erzählinstanz in den
Romanen George Eliots. Trier: WVT 1989.
Nünning 1993
Ansgar Nünning: Renaissance eines anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts
oder Nachruf auf ein literaturkritisches Phantom? Überlegungen und Al-
ternativen zum Konzept des “implied author”. In: DVjs 67 (1993), 1-25.
Nünning 1994
Ansgar Nünning: Gender and Narratology: Kategorien und Perspektiven
einer feministischen Narrativik. In: ZAA 42:2 (1994), 102-121.
Nünning 1995
Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Modelle und
Methoden. Eine Einführung. Trier: WVT 1995.
Works Cited 211
Nünning 1997
Ansgar Nünning: Deconstructing and Reconceptualizing the Implied Au-
thor. The Implied Author – Still a Subject of Debate. In: Anglistik. Mit-
teilungen des Verbandes deutscher Anglisten 8 (1997), 95-116.
Nünning 1998a
Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Pra-
xis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur.
Trier: WVT 1998.
Nünning 1998b
Ansgar Nünning: ‘Unreliable Narration’ zur Einführung: Grundzüge einer
kognitiv-narratologischen Theorie und Analyse unglaubwürdigen Erzäh-
lens. In: Nünning 1998a, 3-39.
Nünning 1999a
Ansgar Nünning: Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive
Theory of ‘Unreliable Narration’: Prolegomena and Hypotheses. In: Grün-
zweig and Solbach 1999, 53-73.
Nünning 1999b
Ansgar Nünning: Reconceptualizing the Theory and Generic Scope of Un-
reliable Narration. In: John Pier (ed.): Recent Trends in Narratological Re-
search. Tours: Tours UP 1999 (GRAAT – Groupes de Recherches Anglo-
Americaines de Tours 21), 63-84.
Nünning 2001a
Ansgar Nünning: Totgesagte leben länger: Anmerkungen zur Rückkehr
des Autors und zu Wiederbelebungsversuchen des “impliziten Autors”. In:
Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 42 (2001), 353-385.
Nünning 2001b
Ansgar Nünning (ed.): Metzler-Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. An-
sätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe. 2nd ed. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler
2001.
Nünning 2001c
Ansgar Nünning: Art. Autor, impliziter. In: Nünning 2001b, 36-37.
Nünning 2005a
Ansgar Nünning: Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration. Synthesizing
Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches. In: Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005,
89-107.
Nünning 2005b
Ansgar Nünning: Art. Implied Author. In: Herman et al. 2005, 239-240..
Nünning 2005c
Ansgar Nünning: Art. Reliability. In: Herman et al. 2005, 495-497.
Nünning and Nünning 2002a
Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning (eds.): Neue Ansätze in der Erzähl-
theorie. Trier: WVT 2002 (Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen
Studium 4).
212 Works Cited
Nünning and Nünning 2002b

Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Erzähltheorie transgenerisch,
intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT 2002 (Handbücher zum literatur-
wissenschaftlichen Studium 5).
Nünning and Nünning 2004
Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Erzähltextanalyse und Gender
Studies. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler 2004.
Olsen 1982
Stein Haugom Olsen: The “Meaning” of a Literary Work. In: NLH 14
(1982), 13-32.
Olson 1952
Elder Olson: An Outline of Poetic Theory. In: Crane et al. 1952, 546-566.
Olson 1966
Elder Olson: The Dialectic Foundations of Critical Pluralism. In: Texas
Quarterly 9 (1966), 202-230.
Olson 1984
Elder Olson: R. S. Crane. In: The American Scholar 53 (1984), 232-238.
Olson 2003
Greta Olson: Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy. In:
Narrative 11 (2003), 93-109.
Palonen 2000
Kari Palonen: Die Umstrittenheit der Begriffe bei Max Weber. In: Scholz
2000, 145-158.
Paschen 1991
Hans Paschen: Narrative Technik im Romanwerk von Gustavo Alvarez
Gardeazábal. Frankfurt/M.: Vervuert 1991.
Pawáowski 1980
Tadeusz Pawáowski: Begriffsbildung und Definition. Berlin and New
York: de Gruyter 1980.
Petersen 1977
Jürgen H. Petersen: Kategorien des Erzählens. Zur systematischen De-
skription epischer Texte. In: Poetica 9 (1977), 167-195.
Petersen 1980
Jürgen H. Petersen: Erzählforschung als Spiegel literaturwissenschaftlicher
Theorie-Diskussion. Aus Anlaß einiger Neuerscheinungen. In: Zeitschrift
für deutsche Philologie 99 (1980), 597-615.
Petersen 1993
Jürgen H. Petersen: Erzählsysteme. Eine Poetik epischer Texte. Stuttgart
and Weimar: Metzler 1993.
Pfister 1977
Manfred Pfister: Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse. 5th ed. Fink: München
1988 (UTB 580).
Works Cited 213
Phelan 1988
James Phelan: Wayne C. Booth. In: Gregory S. Jay (ed.): Modern Ameri-
can Critics Since 1955. Detroit: Gale Research l988, 49-66.
Phelan 1989
James Phelan: Reading People, Reading Plots. Character, Progression, and
the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: Chicago UP 1989.
Phelan 1992
James Phelan: Why Wayne Booth Can’t Get with the Programm; or, The
Nintentional Fallacy. In: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22:3 (1992), 54-58.
Phelan 1996
James Phelan: Narrative as Rhetoric. Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideol-
ogy. Columbus: Ohio State UP 1996.
Phelan 2005
James Phelan: Living to Tell about It. A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character
Narration. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP 2005.
Phelan and Martin 1999
James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin: The Lessons of “Weymouth”:
Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day. In:
Herman 1999, 88-109.
Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.): A Companion to Narrative
Theory. Oxford: Blackwell 2005.
Poletta 1984
Gregory T. Poletta: The Author’s Place in Contemporary Narratology. In:
Anthony Mortimer (ed.): Contemporary Approaches to Narrative. Tübin-
gen: Narr (SPELL – Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 1),
109-123.
Posner 1997
Richard A. Posner: Against Ethical Criticism. In: Philosophy and Litera-
ture 21 (1997), 1-27.
Posner 1998
Richard A. Posner: Against Ethical Criticism, Part Two. In: Philosophy
and Literature 22 (1998), 394-412.
Preston 1997
Elizabeth Preston: Implying Authors in The Great Gatsby. In: Narrative 5
(1997), 143-164.
Prince 1987
Gerald Prince: A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: Nebraska UP 1987.
Prince 1990
Gerald Prince: On Narratology (Past, Present, Future). In: French Litera-
ture Series 17 (1990), 1-14.
214 Works Cited
Prince 1995a
Gerald Prince: Narratology. In: Raman Selden (ed.): The Cambridge His-
tory of Literary Criticism. Vol. 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1995, 110-130.
Prince 1995b
Gerald Prince: On Narratology: Criteria, Corpus, Context. In: Narrative 3
(1995), 73-84.
Prince 1996
Gerald Prince: Narratology, Narratological Criticism and Gender. In:
Calin-Andrei Michailescu and Walid Harmaneh (eds.): Fiction Updated:
Theories of Fictionality, Narratology and Poetics. Toronto: Toronto UP
1996, 159-164.
Quine 1951
Willard V. O. Quine: Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In: Margolis and Laur-
ence 1999, 153-169.
Quine 1960
Willard V. O. Quine: Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
1960.
Rabinowitz 1977
Peter J. Rabinowitz: Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences. In:
Critical Inquiry 4 (1977), 121-141.
Rabinowitz 1987
Peter J. Rabinowitz: Before Reading. Narrative Conventions and the Poli-
tics of Interpretation. With a Foreword by James Phelan. 2nd ed. Ithaca,
New York: Cornell UP 1997.
Rabinowitz 1995
Peter J. Rabinowitz: Other Reader-Oriented Theories. In: Selden 1995,
375-403.
Rahv 1957
Philip Rahv (ed.): Literature in America. An Anthology of Literary Criti-
cism. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company 1957.
Ransom 1938
John Crowe Ransom: Criticism. Inc. In: Glicksberg 1951, 453-467.
Ransom 1941
John Crowe Ransom: The New Criticism. Repr. of the ed. 1941. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press 1979.
Ransom 1952
John Crowe Ransom: Humanism at Chicago. In: Kenyon Review 14
(1952), 647-659.
Rapp 2001
Christof Rapp: Aristoteles zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius 2001.
Reichert 1968/69
John Reichert: Description and Interpretation in Literary Criticism. In:
JAAC 27 (1968/69), 281-292.
Works Cited 215
Reid 1986
Ian Reid: The Death of the Implied Author? Voice, Sequence and Control
in Flaubert’s Trois Contes. In: Australian Journal of French Studies 23:2
(1986), 195-211.
Renner and Habekost 1995
Rolf Günter Renner and Engelbert Habekost (eds.): Lexikon literaturtheo-
retischer Werke. Stuttgart: Kröner 1995.
Rey 2000
Alain Rey: Introduction: Defining Definition. In: Juan C. Sager (ed.): Es-
says on Definition. Amsterdam, Phil.: John Benjamins Publishing 2000, 1-
14.
Richter 1982
David Richter: The Second Flight of the Phoenix: Neo-Aristotelianism
Since R. S. Crane. In: The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
23:1 (1982), 27-48.
Richter 1996
Matthias Richter: Wirkungsästhetik. In: Arnold and Detering 1996, 516-
535.
Rimmon 1976
Shlomith Rimmon: A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative. Genette’s
Figures III and the Structuralist Study of Fiction. In: PTL. A Journal for
Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature l (1976), 33-62.
Rimmon-Kenan 1983
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan: Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. Lon-
don and New York: Routledge 1983.
Rimmon-Kenan 2002
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan: Towards... Afterthoughts, Almost Twenty
Years Later. In: S. R.-K.: Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed.
London and New York: Routledge 2002, 134-149.
Roberts 1962
Mark Roberts: Means to Ends in the Novel (Review Booth 1961). In: Es-
says in Criticism 12:3 (1962), 322-334.
Robinson 1984
Jenefer Robinson: General and Individual Style in Literature. In: JAAC 43
(1984), 147-158.
Robinson 1985
Jenefer Robinson: Style and Personality in the Literary Work. In: Philoso-
phical Review 94:2 (1985), 227-247.
Robinson 1968
Richard Robinson: Definition. Oxford: Clarendon 1968.
Rooy 1997
Ronald de Rooy: Il narrativo nella poesia moderna. Proposte teoriche &
esercizi di lettura. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore 1997.
216 Works Cited
Rorty 1985a
Richard Rorty: Texts and Lumps. In: NLH 17: 1 (1985), 1-15.
Rorty 1985b
Richard Rorty: Philosophy without Principles. In: Critical Inquiry 11:3
(1985), 459-465.
Rorty 1989
Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP 1989.
Rorty 1992
Richard Rorty: The Pragmatist’s Progress. In: Eco 1992a, 89-108.
Rudolph 1962
Frederick Rudolph: The American College and University: A History.
New York: Knopf 1962.
Rühling 1996
Lutz Rühling: Fiktionalität und Poetizität. In: Arnold and Detering 1996,
25-51.
Schalk 2000
Helge Schalk: Umberto Eco und das Problem der Interpretation. Ästhetik,
Semiotik, Textpragmatik. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann 2000
(Epistemata 276).
Schippers 1981
J. G. Schippers: On Persuading (some Notes on the Implied Author in
Critical Discourse). In: Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Let-
ters 11 (1981), 34-54.
Schlickers 1997
Sabine Schlickers: Verfilmtes Erzählen: narratologisch-komparative Un-
tersuchung zu El beso de la mujer araña (Manuel Puig / Héctor Babenco)
und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel García Márquez /
Francesco Rosi). Frankfurt/M.: Vervuert 1997.
Schmid 1973
Wolf Schmid: Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. Mün-
chen: Fink 1973 (Beihefte zu Poetica 10).
Schmid 1974
Wolf Schmid: Review Janik 1973. In: Poetica 4 (1974), 124-134.
Schmid 1986
Wolf Schmid: Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage. Eine Antwort an die Kriti-
ker. In: W. S.: Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. 2nd ed.
Amsterdam: Grüner 1986, 299-318.
Schmid 1987
Wolf Schmid: Analysieren oder Deuten? Überlegungen zur Kontroverse
zwischen Strukturalismus und Hermeneutik am Beispiel von ýechovs “Ne-
vesta”. In: Die Welt der Slawen 32 (1987), 101-120.
Works Cited 217
Schmid 1996
Wolf Schmid: Die Brüder Karamazov als religiöser “Nadryv” ihres Au-
tors. In: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 41 (1996), 25-50.
Schmid 1999
Wolf Schmid: “Dialogizität” in der narrativen “Kommunikation”. In: In-
gunn Lunde (ed.): Dialogue and Rhetoric. Communication Strategies in
Russian Text and Theory. Bergen: Dept. of Russian Studies 1999, 9-23.
Schmid 2005
Wolf Schmid: Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter 2005 (Narratologia 8).
Schmidt 1980/82
Siegfried J. Schmidt: Grundriß der Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft.
Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1991.
Schmidt 1983
Siegfried J. Schmidt: Interpretation: Sacred Cow or Necessity. In: Poetics
12 (1983), 239-258.
Schneider 1994
Anna Dorothea Schneider: Literaturkritik und Bildungspolitik. R. S. Crane,
die Chicago (Neo-Aristotelian) Critics und die University of Chicago. Hei-
delberg: Winter 1994.
Schönert 1999
Jörg Schönert: Empirischer Autor, Impliziter Autor und lyrisches Ich. In:
Jannidis et al. 1999, 289-294.
Schönert 2004
Jörg Schönert: Normative Vorgaben als ‘Theorie der Lyrik’? Vorschläge
zu einer texttheoretischen Revision. In: Gustav Frank and Wolfgang Lukas
(eds.): Norm – Grenze – Abweichung. Kultursemiotische Studien zu Lite-
ratur, Medien und Wirtschaft. Michael Titzmann zum 60. Geburtstag. Pas-
sau: Karl Stutz 2004, 303-318.
Schöttker 1996
Detlef Schöttker: Theorien der literarischen Rezeption. Rezeptionsästhetik,
Rezeptionsforschung, Empirische Literaturwissenschaft. In: Arnold and
Detering 1996, 537-554.
Scholes 1974
Robert Scholes: Structuralism in Literature. An Introduction. New Haven:
Yale UP 1974.
Scholz 2000
Gunter Scholz (ed.): Die Interdisziplinarität der Begriffsgeschichte. Ham-
burg: Meiner 2000 (Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte – Sonderheft).
Schultze-Seehof 2001
Dörte Schultze-Seehof: Italienische Literatursemiotik. Von Avalle bis Eco.
Tübingen: Gunter Narr 2001 (Kodikas/Code Supplement 25).
218 Works Cited
Scott 1962
Wilbur S. Scott: Five Approaches of Literary Criticism. An Arrangement
of Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: Collier Books 1962.
Shereen 1988
Faiza Wahby Shereen: An Introduction to the Assumptions, Methods, and
Practices of the Chicago School of Criticism. Cincinnati: Ph.D. University
of Cincinnati 1988.
Shusterman 1992
Richard Shusterman: Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking
Art. Oxford: Blackwell 1992.
Schutte 1984
Jürgen Schutte: Einführung in die Literaturinterpretation. Stuttgart: Metz-
ler 1984 (Sammlung Metzler 217).
Schwarz 1985
Daniel R. Schwarz: Reality as a Moral Activity (Review Booth 1961 2nd
ed.). In: Sewanee Review 93 (1985), 480-485.
Sontag 1967
Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation. In: S. S.: Against Interpretation and
Other Essays. New York: Dell Publ. 1967, 3-14.
Sparshott 1986
Francis Sparshott: The Case of the Unreliable Author. In: Philosophy and
Literature 10:2 (1986), 145-167.
Spilka 1977
Mark Spilka (ed.): Towards a Poetics of Fiction. Bloomington and Lon-
don: Indiana UP 1977.
Spree 1995
Axel Spree: Kritik der Interpretation. Analytische Untersuchungen zu in-
terpretationskritischen Literaturtheorien. Paderborn: Schöningh 1995.
Spree 2000
Axel Spree: Art. Interpretation. In: Harald Fricke (ed.): Reallexikon der
2000, 168-172.
Sprinker 1985
Michael Sprinker: What Is Living and What is Dead in Chicago Criticism.
In: Boundary. An International Journal of Literature and Culture 13
(1985), 189-212.
Stanzel 1959
Franz K. Stanzel: Episches Praeterium, erlebte Rede, historisches Praesens.
In: Stanzel 2002a, 127-141.
Stanzel 1964
Franz K. Stanzel: Typische Formen des Romans. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht 1964 (Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe 1187).
Works Cited 219
Stanzel 1979
Franz K. Stanzel: Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ru-
precht 1979 (UTB 904).
Stanzel 1992
Franz K. Stanzel: Probleme der Erzählforschung 1950-1990. Ein Rück-
blick. In: Stanzel 2002a, 207-218.
Stanzel 2002a
Franz K. Stanzel: Unterwegs – Erzähltheorie für Leser. Ausgewählte
Schriften mit einer bio-bibliographischen Einleitung und einem Appendix
von Dorrit Cohn. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2002.
Stanzel 2002b
Franz K. Stanzel: Eine Erzähltheorie für Leser. In: Stanzel 2002a, 9-109.
Stecker 1987
Robert Stecker: Apparent, Implied, and Postulated Authors. In: Philosophy
and Literature 11 (1987), 258-272.
Stecker 1997
Robert Stecker: Artworks. Definition – Meaning – Value. University Park,
Pen.: Pennsylvania State UP 1997.
Stecker 2006
Robert Stecker: Interpretation and the Problem of the Relevant Intention.
In: Kieran 2006, 269-295.
Stegner 1961
Wallace Stegner: An Indispensable Book (Review Booth 1961). In: The
American Scholar: A Quarterly for the Independent Thinker 31 (1961),
464-468.
Stout 1982
Jeffrey Stout: What is the Meaning of a Text. In: NLH 14 (1982), 1-12.
Stout 1986
Jeffrey Stout: The Relativity of Interpretation. In: The Monist 69 (1986),
103-118.
Stovall 1955
Floyd Stovall (ed.): The Development of American Literary Criticism.
Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP 1955.
Strelka and Hinderer 1970
Joseph Strelka and Walter Hinderer (eds.): Moderne amerikanische Litera-
turtheorie. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer 1970.
Strube 1993
Werner Strube: Analytische Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft. Unter-
suchungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Definition, Klassifikation, Inter-
pretation, Bewertung. Paderborn: Schöningh 1993.
Strube 2000
Werner Strube: Die literaturwissenschaftliche Textinterpretation. In: Paul
Michel and Hans Weder (eds.): Sinnvermittlung. Studien zur Geschichte
von Exegese und Hermeneutik I. Zürich: Pano-Verlag 2000, 43-69.
220 Works Cited
Strube 2003
Werner Strube: Über verschiedene Arten der Bedeutung sprachlicher Äu-
ßerungen. Eine sprachphilosophische Untersuchung. In: Jannidis et al.
2003, 36-67.
Suleiman and Crosman 1980
Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.): The Reader in the Text. Es-
says on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1980.
Sutton 1963
Walter Sutton: Modern American Criticism. Westport, Con.: Greenwood
Press 1963.
Swiggart 1963
Peter Swiggart: Mr. Booth’s Quarrel with Fiction. In: Sewanee Review 71
(1963), 142-159.
Thompson Klein 1996
Julie Thompson Klein: Crossing Boundaries. Knowledge, Disciplinarities,
and Interdisciplinarities. Charlottesville and London: Virginia UP 1996.
Tillotson 1959
Kathleen Tillotson: The Tale and the Teller. In: Geoffrey Tillotson and K.
T.: Mid-Victorian Studies. London: Athlone Press 1965, 1-23.
Titzmann 1977
Michael Titzmann: Strukturale Textanalyse. Theorie und Praxis der Inter-
pretation. München: Fink 1977 (UTB 582).
Todorov 1969
Tzvetan Todorov: Grammaire du Décaméron. The Hague and Paris: Mou-
ton 1969.
Tolhurst 1979
William E. Tolhurst: On What a Text Is and How It Means. In: BJA 19
(1979), 3-14.
Tolhurst and Wheeler 1979
William E. Tolhurst and Samuel C. Wheeler III: On Textual Individuation.
In: Philosophical Studies 35 (1979), l87-197.
Tolliver 1997
Joyce Tolliver: From Labov and Waletzky to “Contextualist Narratology”:
1967-1997. In: Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1997), 53-60.
Tompkins 1980
Jane Tompkins (ed.): Reader Response Criticism. From Formalism to
Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1980.
Toolan 1988
Michael J. Toolan: Narrative. A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London
and New York: Routledge 1988.
Trivedi 2001
Saam Trivedi: An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism. In: BJA
41:2 (2001), 192-206.
Works Cited 221
Vandevelde 2005
Pol Vandevelde: A Pragmatic Critique of Pluralism in Text Interpretation.
In: Metaphilosophy 36:4 (2005), 501-521.
Veit-Brause 2000
Irmline Veit-Brause: Die Interdisziplinarität der Begriffsgeschichte als
Brücke zwischen den Disziplinen. In: Scholz 2000, 15-29.
Vince 1993
Ronald W. Vince: Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago School. In: Irena R. Ma-
karyk (ed.): Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. Toronto, Buffalo and Lon-
don: Toronto UP 1993, 116-119.
Vivas 1953
Eliseo Vivas: The Neo-Aristotelians of Chicago. In: Sewanee Review 61
(1953), 136-149.
Vietta and Kemper 2000
Silvio Vietta and Dirk Kemper: Germanistik der 70er Jahre. Zwischen In-
novation und Ideologie. München: Fink 2000.
Vollhardt 2003
Friedrich Vollhardt: Von der Rezeptionsästhetik zur Historischen Seman-
tik. In: Adam 2003, 189-209.
vom Brocke 1999
Bernhard vom Brocke: Wege aus der Krise: Universitätsseminar, Akade-
miekommission oder Forschungsinstitut. Formen der Institutionalisierung
in den Geistes- und Naturwissenschaften 1810-1900-1995. In: Christoph
König and Eberhard Lämmert (eds.): Konkurrenten in der Fakultät. Kultur,
Wissen und Universität um 1900. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 191-215.
Wagenknecht 1989
Christian Wagenknecht (ed.): Zur Terminologie der Literaturwisenschaft.
Stuttgart: Metzler 1989 (DFG-Symposien IX).
Wallace 1988
Jon Wallace: The Implied Author as Protagonist. A Reading of Little Big
Man. In: Western American Literature 22 (1988), 291-299.
Wall 1994
Kathleen Wall: The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of
Unreliable Narration. In: JNT 24 (1994), 18-42.
Walsh 1997
Richard Walsh: Who Is the Narrator? In: Poetics Today 18:4 (1997), 495-
513.
Walton 1976
Kendall L. Walton: Points of View in Narrative and Depictive Representa-
tion. In: Noûs 10 (1976), 49-61.
Walton 1979
Kendall L. Walton: Style and the Products and Processes of Art. In: Berel
Lang (ed.): The Concept of Style. 2nd ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP
1987, 72-103.
222 Works Cited
Walton 1990
Kendall L. Walton: Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP 1990.
Warning 1975
Rainer Warning (ed.): Rezeptionsästhetik. Theorie und Praxis. Fink: Mün-
chen 1975.
Weber 1904
Max Weber: Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis. In:
M. W.: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. 6th ed. Ed. by Jo-
hannes Winckelmann. Tübingen: Mohr 1985, 146-214.
Weber 1921
Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr 1921 (Grundriß
der Sozialökonomik 3).
Webster 1979
Grant Webster: The Republic of Letters. A History of Postwar American
Literary Opinion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1979.
Weimann 1967
Robert Weimann: Review Booth 1961. In: ZAA 15:3 (1967), 306-309.
Weimar 1980
Klaus Weimar: Enzyklopädie der Literaturwissenschaft. München: Fran-
cke 1980 (UTB 1034).
Weitz 1977
Morris Weitz: The Opening Mind. A Philosophical Study on Humanistic
Concepts. Chicago and London: Chicago UP 1977.
Wellek 1956
Rene Wellek: American Criticism 1900-1950. New Haven and London:
Yale UP 1956 (A History of Modern Criticism 6).
Wenzel 2001
Peter Wenzel: Art. New Criticism. In: Nünning 2001b, 471-473.
Wenzel 2004
Peter Wenzel: Übergreifende Modelle des Erzähltextes. In: P. W. (ed.):
Einführung in die Erzähltextanalyse. Kategorien, Modelle, Probleme.
Trier: WVT 2004 (Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium
6).
Weststeijn 1984
Willem G. Weststeijn: Author and Implied Author. Some Notes on the
Author in the Text. In: J. J. van Baak (ed.): Signs of Friendship. To Hon-
our A. G. F. van Holk, Slavist, Linguist, Semiotician. Amsterdam: Rodopi
1984, 553-568.
Wiegmann 1981
Hermann Wiegmann: Der implizite Autor des Gedichts. Untersuchungen
zum Verhältnis von Sprecher und textimmanenter Autorposition. In: Ar-
chiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 133:218
(1981), 37-46.
Works Cited 223
Wilson 1981
Daniel S. Wilson: Readers in Texts. In: PMLA 96:1 (1981), 848-863.
Wilson 1997
Kent Wilson: Confession of a Weak Anti-Intentionalist: Exposing Myself.
In: JAAC 55 (1997), 309-311.
Wimsatt 1954a
William K. Wimsatt: The Verbal Icon. Studies in the Meaning of Poetry.
Lexington: Kentucky UP 1954.
Wimsatt 1954b
William K. Wimsatt: The Chicago Critics. The Fallacy of Neoclassic Spe-
cies. In: Wimsatt 1954a, 41-65.
Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy. In:
Wimsatt 1954a, 3-18.
Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley: The Affective Fallacy. In:
Wimsatt 1954a, 21-398.
Winko 1995
Simone Winko: Verstehen literarischer Texte versus literarisches Verste-
hen von Texten? Zur Relevanz kognitionspsychologischer Verstehensfor-
schung für das hermeneutische Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft. In:
DVjs 69 (1995), 1-27.
Wolff 1971
Erwin Wolff: Der intendierte Leser. Überlegungen und Beispiele zur Ein-
führung eines literaturwissenschaftlichen Begriffs. In: Poetica 4 (1971),
141-166.
Wright 1962
Andrew Wright: Man in Charge (Review Booth 1961). In: The Kenyon
Review 24:3 (1962), 566-570.
Yacobi 1981
Tamar Yacobi: Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem. In: Po-
etics Today 2 (1981), 113-126.
Yacobi 1987
Tamar Yacobi: Narrative and Normative Pattern: On Interpreting Fiction.
In: Journal of Literary Studies 3:2 (1987), 18-41.
Yacobi 2001
Tamar Yacobi: Package Deals in Fictional Narrative. The Case of the Nar-
rator’s (Un)reliability. In: Narrative 9:2 (2001), 223-229.
Yacobi 2005
Tamar Yacobi: Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial (Un)Reliability, Divergent
Readings: Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. In: Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005,
108-123.
224 Works Cited
York 1987
Lorraine M. York: “The Pen of the Contriver” and the Eye of the Per-
ceiver. Mansfield Park, the Implied Author and the Implied Reader. In:
English Studies in Canada 13 (1987), 161-173.
Zapf 2001
Hubert Zapf: Art. Chicago-Schule. In: Nünning 2001b, 82-83.
Zerweck 2001
Bruno Zerweck: Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and
Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction. In: Style 35:1 (2001), 151-178.
Zipfel 2001
Frank Zipfel: Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der
Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin:
Erich Schmidt 2001.
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

Implied Author

Încărcat de

Informații document

Descriere originală:

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Implied Author

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller

The Implied Author

Edited by/Herausgegeben von

Editorial Board/Wissenschaftlicher Beirat

The Implied Author

앪앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

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

Part One: Reconstructing the Concept’s History

1 Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics:

2 Between Interpretation Theory and Narratology:

Part Two: Explicating the Concept

3.1 The Implied Author as a Phenomenon of Reception.......... 152

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

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

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

one of the most successful concepts in the academic study of lit-

1 See Kindt and Müller (2002).

ning of the twentieth century. He was perhaps the first person to

6 See, with references to further reading, Palonen (2000).

ticularly normative implications, and thus have numerous signalling

odologies have attracted far less attention in the interdisciplinarity

at a common reference point, a language that would make it pos-

Our study begins by considering the genesis of the implied author

thor is (1) an intentional product of the author in or qua the work or

practice of the New Criticism without directly questioning its

18 See Berman (1988).

structuralism and poststructuralism. Only in the most recent past,

20 On this, see the references in note 3 above.

mate aim is to ascertain the basic meaning of literary works. An

1 Detailed consideration will show that this is something of an oversimplifica-

1.1 The Chicago School of Criticism

1.1.1 The Critical Turn in the Academic Study

Growing dissatisfaction with the situation in literature departments

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

departments to blame this on the problems caused by an increas-

level education remodelled along the lines of the European univer-

as far as the disciplines of the humanities were concerned.10 The

10 Geiger (1993, 245) summarizes developments in the interwar years as fol-

1.1.2 The Chicago Critics: Pluralism and Aristotelianism

The most ambitious alternative to the New Criticism to appear in

13 An overview of the various currents in the academic study of literature in

McKeon, philosopher, and Elder Olson, lyric poet, dramatist, and

16 See the detailed reconstruction in Schneider (1994, 78–80).

were concerned. His reading of the overall situation in the academic

21 Crane (1935, 20–21).

24 Ransom (1938, 456).

since the turn of the century. As Crane highlighted in his introduc-

If, borrowing from Kenneth Burke, we describe the Chicago critics

involve.33 Thus, unlike the New Critics and other proponents of a

believed, could a position of high ground be obtained amid the dis-

36 Olson (1966, 207).

alternative stance that Crane described as a ‘pluralistic and instru-

41 Crane (1952a, 9).

1953 Alexander Lectures, published in his Languages of Criticism

44 Crane (1953a, 27).

47 Crane (1957, iv–v).

they felt that an Aristotelian approach helped to highlight aspects of

53 Burke (1943, 85).

dure. Instead of the top-down interpretation that had become the

an interplay of empirical observation and generic supposition.