The term "Intentional Fallacy" was coined by American New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their 1946 essay of the same name.

The "fallacy" is the misguided belief that the meaning or value of a literary work can be determined by the author's declared or supposed intentions. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that the text is an autonomous, public object; what the author meant to say is irrelevant compared to what the text actually says.

Matching foundational continental philosophy/theory texts to their authors:

A. Karl Marx — (III) The German Ideology. Co-authored with Engels, establishing historical materialism.

B. Claude Lévi-Strauss — (IV) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. The foundational text of Structural Anthropology.

C. Michel Foucault — (I) Madness and Civilization. His critical history of how society defined and confined the mentally ill.

D. Jean-Paul Sartre — (II) Being and Nothingness. The central text of French Existentialism.

Statement I is True: Jacques Derrida (in works like The Truth in Painting) deconstructs Kantian aesthetics, arguing that there is no such thing as a "pure," disinterested, or neutral aesthetic realm. Art and aesthetics are always framed by external values, institutional borders, and cultural interests (the parergon).

Statement II is highly problematic but marked True in the key: Derrida did not believe in a stable, objective "truth" that historians point out. He argued that aesthetics is always already embedded in outside influences, not just when someone points out "truth." However, in the context of the NTA key, they accepted both as true regarding his critique of historical aesthetic assessment.

The concept of "Carnival" (or the Carnivalesque) in literary theory:

• (A) True: It was developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of Rabelais (Rabelais and His World).
• (B) True: It refers to the subversion of official, serious authority through popular, grotesque, and bodily humor.
• (C) True: It temporarily suspends or overturns established social hierarchies (e.g., the fool becomes king), creating a democratic, liberating counter-culture.

Why D and E are wrong: Carnival specifically mocks and dismantles the "serious" elements of culture (D is false). Bakhtin explicitly applied his theories of Carnival and Dialogism to the Novel (specifically polyphonic novels like Dostoevsky's), not to poetry, which he viewed as too monologic (E is false).

This concept is the core of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of "Heteroglossia" and "Dialogism."

Bakhtin viewed language and the novel not as a single, unified voice of the author, but as a chaotic, dynamic "site of struggle." He argued that every text contains a tension between "centripetal" forces (the official, authoritative, unifying language of the ruling class) and "centrifugal" forces (the subversive, popular, diverse, and chaotic language of the people).

These statements refer to Michel Foucault's 1963 book, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception.

Statement I is True: Foucault argues that the political and institutional upheaval of the French Revolution secularized healthcare, moving it out of religious institutions and into state-run, scientific hospitals ("the clinic").

Statement II is True: With the rise of the "medical gaze," the doctor replaced the priest as the ultimate authority figure. Instead of spiritual surveillance over the soul (confession to a priest), the new system demanded anatomical surveillance and discipline over the physical body (diagnosis by a doctor).

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is famous for structuring human subjectivity and development into three intersecting registers/orders: The Real (A), The Symbolic (C), and The Imaginary (E).

Why B and D are wrong: The "Id" and the "Ego" (along with the Superego) are the tripartite structural model of the psyche developed exclusively by Sigmund Freud, not Lacan.

Jacques Derrida (Deconstruction) and Roland Barthes (Post-Structuralism) share several core tenets regarding language:

• (A) True: They believe in the "free play" of signifiers (Derrida's différance, Barthes's jouissance).
• (B) True: Meaning is never final or closed (Barthes's "Death of the Author" opens the text to infinite reader interpretation).
• (D) True: Because of this endless play, meaning is inherently unstable and unreliable.
• (E) True: Meaning comes from the relationship between words (the system of signs) rather than an inherent, essential meaning resting inside a single word.

Statement C ("retrospective power") is not a primary, shared foundational convergence point highlighted in standard post-structuralist comparisons.

Statement I is True: In his landmark 1967 essay "The Death of the Author", Roland Barthes explicitly states that the modern concept of the "Author" as a solitary genius owning their text is a product of English empiricism, French rationalism, and the culmination of capitalist ideology (which values private property and individual ownership).

Statement II is True: In his 1936 essay "The Storyteller", Walter Benjamin laments the decline of traditional storytelling. He observes that, unlike modern, disposable "information," a true story always contains "something useful"—whether a moral, a practical lesson, or shared human wisdom.