of the available resources of language. At the same time, as the discussion of
the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice shows, if we focus only on possible
meanings, we miss entirely the ways in which intention can govern the use of
those linguistic resources.
This distinction between intention and meaning is relevant to the prin-
ciple that narrative communication involves a feedback loop among autho-
rial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response. In the present context,
the most important aspect of the metaphor is its stipulation that authorial
agency—and more specifically, the intentionality of that agency—is accessible
through textual phenomena and (partially) testable against reader response.
Rhetorical theory is ultimately interested not in private intention but in pub-
lic, textualized intentions.
The second crucial aspect of intentionality for rhetorical theory is that it
operates at the level of the whole narrative communication. The intention-
ality of Pride and Prejudice is more than the sum of the intentions of the
novel’s individual sentences. Instead, that intentionality is a larger system of
thought, the purposive design of the narrative that governs the entire set of
the implied Austen’s constructive choices. This set includes her choices about
such things as how to handle the probability of events early and late (see the
discussion in chapter 3) as well as how to arrange events when their arrange-
ment is optional (for example, she orders the marriages of the Bennet sisters
in climactic sequence—first Lydia’s, then Jane’s, then Elizabeth’s); which nar-
rative techniques to deploy at which points (for example, when representing
Elizabeth’s response to Darcy’s letter, Austen gives us a lot of Elizabeth’s direct
thought in order to convey her appropriately harsh self-judgments); and more.
All these choices contribute to the novel’s purposive design of combining its
critique of the marriage market with its tracing of the ethical maturation of
both Elizabeth and Darcy so that the audience can take deep satisfaction in
their engagement.
These two points—the distinction between intention and meaning, and
the idea that intentionality operates at a global level—link up with the argu-
ment in chapter 2 about the temporal unfolding of the relation between tex-
tual and readerly dynamics and its effects on textual construction. Together
these points and that argument highlight the importance of the temporal
dimension of the narrative communication to the developing apprehension
of a system of intentionality. As we read, we develop hypotheses about that
system, and these hypotheses influence how we respond to new parts of a text,
even as those new parts have the potential to alter our developing hypotheses.
This understanding in turn allows us to recognize that not every sentence (or
other part of the constructive design) will necessarily contribute to the posi-
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