The author whose intentions are responsible for a text's meaning — JOI's coded filmography

echoes

Early text: "a writer—the person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features—and an author—the entity whose intentions are taken to be responsible for a text’s meaning" [the writer/author distinction]; "Authors are monkeys who mean" [same passage]; "It doesn’t matter what the writer means, basically, for the New Critics; it matters only what the text says" [the Intentional-Fallacy passage].
IJ echo: The archive's filmography-coded-message question — whether JOI's filmography (esp. the endnote-24 catalog) is a coded autobiography whose meaning is anchored in its author's intentions. Wallace's writer/author distinction is exactly the axis that question turns on: is JOI merely the writer whose choices produced the films' features, or the author whose intentions are responsible for their meaning (a message aimed at his family)? The essay supplies the conceptual vocabulary (intention-as-locus-of-meaning) the coded-message and communication-vs-weapon (entertainment-purpose) debates are conducted in.
Weight: shared-preoccupation