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Swinging very slightly off topic, Chris's insightful remarks remind me of one of the biggest difficulties I have with accounts that suggest that what is true in a story are just those propositions that we can argue the author/creator of that story intended to be part of the story. As Chris, suggests, sometimes we just don't buy into the things the author intends for us to buy into. We can say things like (Chris's) "They wanted the president to be unsympathetic but I liked him." I'd like to go even further, and assert that in such cases we may even want to claim that in the story/film the character of the president is, in fact, likeable (perhaps, likeable is a bad example, because it is so subjective. Still, I could imagine attempting to argue in favor of such a claim.) Now, in order to defend this move of questioning author's intentions, we could replace reference to actual authors with reference to implied authors, but sometimes this would seem a very odd thing to do. Suppose you are watching a film that was made in the first half of this century, and you can figure out that clearly the film was made by people who held certain beliefs about the capabilities of women, or of people from certain cultures, etc., and you know that these beliefs are completely unfounded and wrong. Perhaps, we might want to say that you can still watch the film and construct a story where women, or the members of those particular cultures etc., are the way they actually are and not the way that the filmmaker assumed you would believe them to be. Now, in order to construct an implied filmmaker that agrees with the story you actually construct, you'd have to posit a filmmaker who was way ahead of his time. Since the bigioted authorial intentions are very evident, you'd also have to suppose that this filmmaker had a very sophisticated and subtile, and yet potentially quite deceiving way of telling a story. Rather than jumping through all these hoops, isn't it simply better to admit that sometimes we want to say that there are things that are true in a story that are not discovered by any appeal to authorial intentions. Sometimes we just pull story meaning directly from the story's events as they are described, whether or not we know, or could know, that this is the meaning the author wished for us to discover. Perhaps, however, this is not story interpretation after all, but something else... Ah, well. Just more rambling thoughts I suppose. Still, any takers? All the best, Karen Bardsley %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%