On Authors, Readers, and Phenomenology: Husserlian Intentionality in the Literary Theories of E. D. Hirsch and Jacques Derrida.

Abstract

No two contemporary critics could be further apart in their positions than E. D. Hirsch and Jacques Derrida, yet both derive their ideas about literary meaning from Edmund Husserl's theory of intentionality. Hirsch uses Husserl's theory to support his arguments for the authorial determinacy of meaning, while Derrida uses it to diffract determinacy, breaking up authorial self-presence. Although Hirsch and Derrida read Husserl to different ends, together they have solidified a view of Husserl as an austere rationalist. This view makes Husserl's descriptive phenomenology seem, for many, irrelevant to contemporary literary theory. This dissertation reassesses this view. It claims that both Hirsch and Derrida misread Husserl and offers a corrective reading. Chapter one focusses on Hirsch's argument that the stability of meaning, upon which authorial determinacy depends, is guaranteed by Husserl's concept that verbal meaning is an intentional object. The study details some of the difficulties created by Hirsch's reading of Husserl, and argues instead that Husserl defined meaning not as object but as act. Although Husserl located linguistic stability in intentional units of meaning, he also accounted for linguistic indeterminacy. Given this, Husserl's tri-partite structure of meaning lends itself more profitably to reader-response criticism, than to a theory of authorial determinacy. Chapters two and three focus on Derrida's well-known critique of Husserl's theory of signs and of the teleology of intentionality in Speech and Phenomena. This critique has contributed to the view of Husserl as an austere rationalist who shackles meaning to the firm foundation of presence. The study challenges Derrida's interpretation and speculates that Derrida's critique of a theory of signs, developed early in Husserl's career, is designed to cover the traces of the later Husserl in his work. In his first major study on Husserl, his Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, Derrida praises the radicalizing gestures which Husserl made toward the end of his career. The study argues that Derrida's notions of deconstruction and differance can be linked to the later Husserl's dismantling procedure and to the conception of phenomenology as Idea in the Kantian sense.