The Interpretive and Ethical Payoffs of Intention-Curious Rhetorical Reading: Fictionality, Original Paratexts, and Ford’s Impressionism

In recent years, debates about whether readers should consider authorial intention have given way to demonstrations of the interpretive and ethical consequences of not doing so. This article takes up a case study featuring an author’s and a critic’s conflicting ideas about authorial intention in relation to the use of fictionality as a rhetorical strategy in narrative fiction. This article demonstrates the value, for successful author–reader communication through texts employing fictionality, of intention-curious rhetorical reading: openness to maximizing the interpretive relevance of statements of authorial intention appearing in paratexts and epitexts. In unpacking the clash between author Ford Madox Ford and critic Gerald Gould vis-à-vis errors of fact and misquotations in Parade’s End, this article takes an historical approach, highlighting the relationship between changing ideas about authorial intention and changing forms of literary criticism, and a theoretical approach, drawing on rhetorical narrative theory and fictionality theory.