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he was absolutely not in the school of education at UVA. He was a professor of English. My teacher at the College of William and Mary, Marguerite Mason, has actually worked at the University of Virginia's school of education and she can ASSURE you that he most definitely did not work in the school of education. He was an English teacher, plain and simple. |
m Typo/date fixes, replaced: 1970's → 1970s, HIrsch → Hirsch |
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In a review of important works on interpretation, Sherri Irvin gives the following summary of ''Validity in Interpretation'': <blockquote>The seminal statement of actual intentionalism: Hirsch holds that ‘meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of physical signs or things’ (23), though he allows that linguistic convention constrains the meanings the author can intend for a particular utterance. He argues that the author's intention is necessary to fix meaning, since the application of conventions alone would typically leave a text wildly indeterminate.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Irvin|first=Sherri|date=14 September 2021|title=Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning|journal=Philosophy Compass |volume=4 |pages=287–291 |doi=10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00180.x |doi-access=free}}</ref> </blockquote>Hirsch's "intentionalist" and "objectivist" views on [[hermeneutics]] are close to those of the Italian jurist [[Emilio Betti]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Prakoso|first=T.|title=Understanding the Core Ideas of Hermeneutics Figures|journal=Kne Social Sciences |year=2018 |volume=3 |issue=9 |page=702 |doi=10.18502/kss.v3i9.2733 |s2cid=73567480 |url=https://knepublishing.com/index.php/KnE-Social/article/view/2733/5892|url-status=live|access-date=14 September 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200910044154/https://knepublishing.com/index.php/KnE-Social/article/view/2733/5892 |archive-date=2020-09-10 |doi-access=free }}</ref> On the other hand, his views run largely contrary to the views of [[Martin Heidegger]] and his student [[Hans-Georg Gadamer]] as well as the views of [[William K. Wimsatt|W. K. Wimsatt]] and [[Monroe Beardsley]] on the "semantic autonomy" of works of literature, as expressed in "[[The intentional fallacy|The Intentional Fallacy]]."<ref name="Wimsatt_1946">{{Cite journal|last1=Wimsatt|first1=W. K.|last2=Beardsley|first2=M. C.|date=1946|title=The Intentional Fallacy|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676|journal=The Sewanee Review|volume=54|issue=3|pages=468–488|issn=0037-3052|jstor=27537676|access-date=March 31, 2021}}</ref>
Hirsch continued to publish on [[hermeneutics]] and the concept of [[authorial intent]] in the late 1960s and early
Hirsch's views on hermeneutics have been widely cited—Google Scholar lists more than 4,400 citations for ''Validity in Interpretation''—but they have also been widely criticized.<ref name="Wimsatt_1946" />
==Composition and Theory of Writing==
In the early 1970s Hirsch began working on the theory of writing and composition, publishing several articles and a book, ''The Philosophy of Composition'' (1977). The central concept in this book is the idea of "relative readability." One piece of writing is more readable, in terms of relative readability, than another if it conveys the same meaning but is easier to read and is read more quickly than the alternative passage. ''The Philosophy of Composition'' was widely reviewed and generated a lot of discussion in composition circles for several years, but Hirsch's work in this area is no longer widely discussed.<ref>"
In the late 1970s, Hirsch and some colleagues at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on relative readability. Participants in the experiments were assigned either a well written passage or a poorly written (stylistically degraded) version of the same passage. Hirsch and his colleagues recorded reading time to determine whether the well written passages were in fact read more quickly, as they predicted they would be. They discovered that they were. However, they also discovered that there was another factor that was even more important than relative readability: if the students lacked crucial background knowledge, they struggled to read both the poorly written and the well written passage. This became particularly clear while Hirsch was running tests at a Virginia community college. The students at the community college did not know who Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were and, as a result, they struggled to make sense of a passage on the U.S. Civil War. Hirsch observed that these students lacked "cultural literacy."<ref>E. D. Hirsch, "Cultural Literacy" ''The American Scholar'' (1983).</ref> They had adequate decoding skills for reading, but they began to struggle when they lacked relevant background knowledge.<ref name="NYT_Hitchens_19900513">{{Cite news|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher|date=May 13, 1990|title=Why we don't know what we don't know just ask E. D. Hirsch|work=The New York Times|location=Charlottesville, Virginia|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/13/magazine/why-we-don-t-know-what-we-don-t-know-just-ask-ed-hirsch.html|access-date=April 1, 2021|issn=0362-4331}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Hirsch|first=E. D.|date=1983|title="Cultural Literacy"|journal=The American Scholar}}</ref>
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