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Canon vs. authorial intent
Is there a difference?
I'm asking because 101 Dalmatians: The Series has led me to believe that canon is a silly idea.
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And, yes, there is a difference. A canon is not necessarily established by the author of a work, and the author's views may or may not be canon.
If you're asking whether there's a technical distinction, yeah, there is. Very roughly: They're concerned with different things. Canon is concerned with texts themselves, authorial intent is concerned with the interpretation of those texts. Of course it can get a bit more complicated than that, as when a canon includes comments made by an author.
With regards to 101 'canon' is a slightly more complicated issue because it's a cartoon loosely based on an animated movie rather less loosely based on a novel. Fans of the novel might consider The Starlight Barking canon but not the movie, fans of the movie might consider only the movie to be canon and nothing else.
i do think that's a bit silly because the movie is great the way it is, but that's an opinion
Anyway, it really depends on the work.
like suppose you're running a fan community or wiki, and you want to define the scope of what "happened", within the fictional universe of the show
then you need to make certain decisions, like, did the content of the movie happen, or the book, or both?
and one thing you might want to ask is, do comments made by the author in interviews or other supplementary texts describe things that happened?
that's where canon and authorial intent are the same, or nearly the same
(there's still the aforementioned theoretical issues, stuff like DOTA and the so-called intentional fallacy, and just the hermeneutic gap, so on a technical level they're still distinct concepts)
The Intentional Fallacy is a slightly older essay by WK Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, in which they (somewhat controversially) argued that making reference to authorial intent is outright fallacious, because we don't have access to the author's thoughts in the text - we only have access to the text itself, which is there for us to interpret as best we can. Unlike Barthes, Wimsatt and Beardsley were traditional critics, and were interested in finding the 'correct' reading of the text, but they believed authorial intent was not available as a means to determine this, and was furthermore irrelevant to it.
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. By hermeneutic gap i mean the divide between one person's understanding of a text and another person's (e.g. the author's) understanding of it. We don't, ultimately, have access to what another person is thinking independent of our own interpretation of it, because interpretation is how we derive meaning.
Discussions of canon don't usually consider these kinds of questions. When they do, they often leave them open, meaning that all interpretations are valid so long as they are in agreement with the canon, which might be expanded to include clarifying statements by the author. But the author's comments themselves have to be interpreted to be understood, so on a theoretical level, canon and authorial intent remain quite distinct.
^ Sometimes. It can come down to trivia, but traits of character and the events that shape them are pretty damned important, and that is the core of canon-qua-canon.
Which is not to say that "canon" as fans understand it isn't important to the building of meaning. It's that the building of the text's meaning isn't important to fans.
What they want are toys to play with, gaps they can fill with their own understanding.
It's not wrong but it's not what I fuck with.
I was an idiot and could only think "Defense of the Ancients" upon seeing "DOTA". Lol.
Anyway, I think my own perspective is similar to Barthes's DOTA, except that I believe that the text doesn't have no mean; rather, it has or can have a variable meaning, depending on who the audience is.
It isn't exactly a fully distinct perspective, admittedly, since one could argue that if this meaning depends on the audience (including possibly the author 'emself), then the text alone has no meaning.
Wimsatt and Beardsley, similarly, have a point in observing that we can't always know or even ask what the author was thinking.
Furthermore, just like how we create interpretations of real-life events we experience, and we often disagree on those interpretations, so too do we create interpretations of the fictional events we experience, and just as our different interpretations of real-life events are meaningful to ourselves, so are our different interpretations of fictional events meaningful to ourselves. Though in the case of fictional events, an additional dimension of variability is introduced -- the timeline. In real life, there is only one true timeline and sequence of events, which we may or may not be able to determine fully but which we at least ideally try to determine fully. But in fiction, that itself can be changed too, which leads to an even greater interpretation-space. Of course, with assumptions of canon, we can limit that space. Still, the inconsequentiality of alternate interpretations means that, even given the same assumptions of canonicity, there is little reason to assume that one is inherently superior. It may certainly be more or less applicable for particular purposes though.