In both cases, the reader is able to extract some external information from knowledge of an author’s previous work or from other works that incorporate similar ideas. This is an effective way of deciding which beliefs the author wants to be adopted, by making relations between a present story and ones previously written. It may also be helpful to know the time and place the story was written. Sometimes present-day knowledge can contradict the content of stories written in the past. It is thus pertinent that one keeps the story’s context at the fore front of thought when trying to extract the underlying content.The use of an author’s intentions as key to understanding the meaning or value of a literary work is referred to as intentionalism. Livingston uses the term ‘absolutist intenionalism’ and defines it simply as “all meaning is speaker’s meaning” (348) . However, Livingston states that his intention is to defend only a moderate version. Therefore only some of the “aesthetically relevant meanings” (348) are notable.To take for example, Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight, the hero looks down from his plane at the house lights of the village below emerging from darkness one by one. He compares them to the light emanating from the stars one by one at dusk. While on ground, the character looks at the stars for direction, and while in the sky, he looks for the stars’ equivalent on the ground. In the text this analogy is aesthetically perfect, however the author is trying to convey the special connection between the hero and the stars as guidance in a broad sense. To understand the full intent of this, it might help the reader to know that Saint-Exupery was a pilot in the war-torn world of the 1930s when pilots relied on rudimentary instrumentation systems and often compensated by looking at stars for navigation during their long and lonely journeys. The reade...
