AESTHETICS shared a conception of art as expression of emotion Most twentieth-century philosophers rejected the Tolstoyan view of the function of art as the communication of emotion Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote: There is much that could be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing that the work of art conveys a ‘feeling’ And indeed you might call it, if not the expression of a particular feeling, an expression of feeling, or a felt expression And you might say too that people who understand it to that extent ‘resonate’ with it, respond to it You might say: The work of art does not seek to convey something else, just itself As, if I pay someone a visit, I don’t wish only to produce such and such feelings in him, but first and foremost to pay him a visit—though of course I also want to be welcome The real absurdity starts when it is said that the artist wants others, in reading, to feel what he felt while writing I can indeed think that I understand a poem, for example, that is, understand it in the way its author would want it to be understood But what he may have felt while writing it isn’t any concern of mine at all (CV 67) The independence of a work of art from its creator became a prominent theme, both in the English-speaking world and in continental Europe American critics denounced as ‘the intentional fallacy’ any attempt to reach an understanding of a text on the basis of elements in its author’s biography or psychology or motivation, rather than in properties to be discerned in the text in isolation In France, philosophers went so far as to speak of ‘the death of the author’ The text, they have argued, is the primary object; the notion of an author is rather an economic and legal construct So far as interpretation goes, the reception of a text by generations of readers may be of greater significance than any item in the biography of the person who initially penned it The thesis of the death of the author has not been warmly welcomed in British philosophical circles But the idea that in the interpretation of a work of art the author has no privileged status was anticipated by a nineteenth-century Englishman The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough wrote a controversial, some thought blasphemous, poem about the Resurrection, Easter Day In a later poem he imagines himself questioned about its meaning: was it intended to be ironic or sarcastic? He responds: Interpret it I cannot I but wrote it 268