Reading Comprehension — Passage 1
Questions 11–15 are based on the passage below.
Literary critics have long debated whether an author's stated intentions should govern the interpretation of a text, a question given its sharpest formulation in a mid-twentieth-century essay that labeled reliance on authorial intention "the intentional fallacy." Proponents of this view argued that a poem or novel, once published, becomes a public object whose meaning is available for readers to discover through close attention to the text itself, independent of what the author may have privately intended or later claimed to have meant. Critics of this position countered that entirely disregarding intention risks license for arbitrary interpretation, since a text considered wholly apart from its historical and biographical context can be made to mean almost anything a sufficiently inventive reader wishes. A middle position, associated with reader-response theory, sidesteps the dispute somewhat by relocating meaning not in the author's intention nor in the text alone, but in the interaction between text and reader, acknowledging that different readers, shaped by different experiences, may reasonably arrive at different, equally defensible readings of the same passage. This third position has itself drawn criticism for potentially collapsing into the same problem of interpretive license it was meant to avoid, since if every reading is equally valid, the concept of a "wrong" interpretation becomes difficult to sustain.