The Circle of Audience Ownership

After discussion in class, I have been thinking a lot about the quality of ownership concerning a text, whether a piece of writing can belong to the author or if it belongs completely to the public after being written. This has been an issue in both Wimsatt and Beardsley's The Intentional Fallacy and Miller's Genre As Social Action. Both texts deal with the interaction of literature in society and how the two function together in understanding intention.

There are three elements in the equation of interpretation: author, audience, and critic. In Wimsatt and Beardsley's piece, they address this as they write, "'Is not a critic, asks Professor Stoll, 'a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own'"(812). They set the critic aside as a separate participant in the writing, then go on to say, "The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in the language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge"(812). In this case, the poem does not belong to the creator, the critic, but to those that the poem came from - the inspiration, which is the audience. The public acts as the paint on the canvas that they get handed back to them.

This interpretation parallels many of Miller's arguments in Genre As Social Action because Miller's argument lies in the effect of society on genre, which can be extended to literary criticism. Miller writes, "Situations are social constructs that are the results, not of 'perception,' but of 'definition.' Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material cases, at the center of action is a process of interpretation"(284). Human action is the derivative of interpretation. This then makes sense that the critic must be taken out of the equation and left unable to be the owner of a text. The audience is not preoccupied with judging the text, and can therefore interact with it like the the author intended, with the image of the audience in mind. This circular method of ownership is what I have come to when it comes to who owns poems, prose, etc., but I would be really interested in how everyone else sees it!