We are not the first critics to try to loosen the grip of the Intentional Fallacy. Seán Burke, David Herman, and John Farrell, among others, have made cases for what E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in the 1960s called the “validity” of interpretation based on authorial intention. Narratologists continue to debate the utility of the concept of the implied author, and those on the side of its utility link it to authorial agency. Nevertheless, most contemporary critics prefer to talk about what texts and readers do rather than what authors do.

This panel intervenes in this conversation by demonstrating the value of interpretation rooted in authorial agency. Each talk on this panel takes up interpretive problems posed by formal experimentation in culturally significant prose fictions and proposes persuasive solutions that are made possible by attending to authorial agency. In each case, the solutions identify the consequences of the formal experimentation for the ethical dimensions of the narrative under discussion.

In “What Authorial Intention Illuminates About American Literary Realism,” Faye Halpern uncovers a characteristic feature of American literary realist sketches by minoritized writers: how they engage in what Peter J. Rabinowitz calls “rhetorical passing.” Charles Chesnutt and Constance Fenimore Woolson construct narratives that can be read differently depending on the audience. For example,“The Goophered Grapevine” was read by the Atlantic’s elite white audience as a fantastical tale whereas later readers see it as a skewering of white supremacist thinking. So far, this speaker has described her talk in a conventional, authorial agency-denying way: these stories “can be read” differently. But “rhetorical passing” depends on acknowledging the formal choices authors make to invite certain misreadings–and then expose them. Without the notion of authorial agency, we cannot distinguish a text that rhetorically passes from one undergoing a normal evolution of interpretations or install ethical guardrails against interpretations that attribute subversiveness to racist authors.

James Phelan in “Who Arranged Things This Way–and Why? Progression and Ethics in The Underground Railroad,” analyzes the formal, ethical, and affective consequences of salient aspects of the ending of Colson Whitehead’s award-winning 2016 novel. Specifically, in the penultimate chapter called “Mabel,” readers learn of the fate of the protagonist Cora’s mother, but Cora, who has been obsessed with the question of what happened to Mabel, does not; and (2) the novel’s sequence of historical documents by white enslavers offering rewards for information about runaway females is broken by the insertion of a fictional one describing Cora–and announcing the easy-to-miss resolution that “she has stopped running.” Phelan argues that (a) these striking aspects of the ending point to the crucial role of Whitehead’s agency in constructing the whole progression; and that (b) their affective and ethical effects help readers understand Whitehead’s larger designs on his target audience.

Yonina Hoffman, in “Evan Dara: Authors, Readers, and Ecological Vulnerability” argues that although Evan Dara in The Lost Scrapbook initially seems to write against the notion of authorial design, he ultimately develops a notion of author as collaborative (and vulnerable) agent, emphasizing the ethical necessity of embracing authorship–and agency–in a world that constantly threatens to destroy it. The book’s narrative mosaic eschews a single plot line, character, or setting, emphasizing what Stefano Ercolino calls the “chaos” of the encyclopedic novel. But by referring to deconstruction, quantum physics, anthropology, and depicting a chemical-ecological disaster that sickens a community, Dara coheres the novel thematically around vulnerability and relational identity. By dramatizing the negation of autonomous individuality, Dara’s emphasis on vulnerability requires readers to reimagine authors, and readers, within a (rhetorical) ecology in which identity, body, and voice are both threatened and reimagined. The novel’s ethical commitments direct readers back to Dara, who joins readers in relational community with his vulnerable but intentional communication.