Long-time readers of this site have heard me mention this before, but several years back, while teaching an honor’s seminar in interpretation theory, I made the intentionalist argument via a backhanded play:  having assigned H.A. and Margret Rey’s Curious George to my class, I supplied along with it three essays (ostensibly from scholarly journals), each purporting to analyze the story through a specific theoretical lens. The essays were fakes (see

In response to my post yesterday about intentionalism as it applies to the Bill Bennett dustup, Politechnical Institute writes: There are two factors at work here—one, an intellectual understanding of how communication works, and two, a political understanding of how the current reality works. First, communicators must ALWAYS be aware of how their messages may be interpreted. This is standard business and political doctrine. If this were purely about intent,

Fresh from insisting that I write like shit, someone calling himself “frameone,” pontificating at length in ODub’s comments, follows up on yesterday’s discussion of racist sigification by setting the intentionalists straight: You guys misunderstand. Articulate doesn’t just mean what it means, it also signifes a level of cultural capital that, by and large, goes without saying (unconsciously) when whites speak positively about other white peers. (A white adult might refer

Another object lesson to drive home just what is likely to happen when the signifier (be it an arc, the graphic outline of a swirly cone, or a scribbled mark) is removed from its intentional moorings—this time provided by Oliver Willis, in a typically moronic post. Seizing on Ed Morrisey’s use of the word “articulate” to describe Michael Steele (a Black man), Oliver Willis—who, let’s face it, has never met