Regarding the University and the Author: Actually, the University as an institution has long been a vigorous protector of the "author" as icon. Perhaps the reason certain parts of it (like Lit. Crit. or Philosophy or Theory) have often been somewhat suspicious of intention as meaning however (even the stuffy old New Critics had their Wimsatt and Beardsley and the Intentional Fallacy after all, and you can find critiques of intention and rhetoric that go all the way back to the Greeks) is what happens in the classroom (and Marxism has nothing to do with this). It's simple, really. This week I am in the midst of teaching works by Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Plato and Descartes. Whatever is happening when I "teach" them, there is certainly not a transference of the intentions of these men through me to my students. I'd never want to claim that or to defend that as a goal even. That doesn't mean the students don't "learn" stuff about these works and about when and where and by whom they were written; it just means that intention is definitely being exceeded and even displaced by what ends up getting taught. At least that's what seems to be happening when I read the exams. --John