The artist and the artistic process practice questions.

A critic accepts that a poet's letters cannot settle what a poem means, but holds that its meaning is the intention a suitably informed reader would ascribe to the author. This position is best described as

• actual intentionalism, which identifies meaning with what the author privately had in mind
• anti-intentionalism, which treats the words on the page as the sole determinant of meaning
• reader-response criticism, which locates the meaning in each reader's own encounter with the text
• hypothetical intentionalism, which takes meaning to be the best-supported hypothesis about the author's aims

Answer: hypothetical intentionalism, which takes meaning to be the best-supported hypothesis about the author's aims

The position keeps a role for intention while accepting that the author's private evidence is not decisive, so it sits between Wimsatt and Beardsley on one side and Barthes on the other. It is not reader-response criticism, since the standard is a reader properly informed about the work's context rather than any actual reader's experience.

A composer works entirely within a strict traditional form and produces something nobody had thought of before. Which account of creativity does the case put under pressure?

• the view that creating requires departing from the rules that govern a practice
• the view that a creative work must be valuable and not merely novel
• the view that creativity can be assessed only by the artist herself
• the view that a work is creative only if the artist cannot explain how it was made

Answer: the view that creating requires departing from the rules that govern a practice

Novelty within a constraint separates two things that are often run together: originality as breaking rules and originality as producing something unforeseeable. Kant's account of genius belongs on the second side, since the rule is given by nature through the artist rather than broken by her.

Nietzsche distinguishes two impulses at work in art, one giving form, measure and individuation, the other dissolving boundaries in intoxication and collective feeling. His claim about Greek tragedy is that

• tragedy is the achievement of the form-giving impulse alone, with the other suppressed by the discipline of the stage and of the chorus
• the two impulses are alternative styles, so that any given work belongs to one or the other of them
• the two impulses are stages in the history of art, the second having replaced the first in the classical period
• tragedy arises from the two impulses held together, so that formless intensity is given shape without being tamed away

Answer: tragedy arises from the two impulses held together, so that formless intensity is given shape without being tamed away

The interest of the account lies in the tension: the Apollonian supplies the image and the Dionysian what the image is an image of, and either alone would not be tragedy. Treating the pair as a classification of styles loses the argument entirely.

A critic holds that the meaning of a poem is not what its author actually intended, and not whatever a reader takes from it, but what an appropriately informed audience would best hypothesise the author to have intended, given the work and its context. This position is

• hypothetical intentionalism, which keeps intention as a construct of ideal interpretation rather than a private fact
• actual intentionalism, since it makes the author's state of mind the criterion of what the work means
• the intentional fallacy, since it holds that intention is wholly irrelevant to the meaning of a work
• reader-response criticism, since it makes the meaning depend on what an individual reader happens to find in the text

Answer: hypothetical intentionalism, which keeps intention as a construct of ideal interpretation rather than a private fact

The position occupies the middle ground: evidence external to the work, such as a private letter, does not settle meaning, while the work is still read as an utterance by someone. Its difficulty is saying which audience counts as appropriately informed without smuggling in the author's actual intentions.

A quartet improvises for forty minutes; nothing is written down and the performance is never repeated. A philosopher asks what the work is in such a case. The philosophically interesting difficulty is that

• improvised music cannot be assessed critically, since there is no score against which to check the performance afterwards
• the players did not intend to make art, so nothing was created that criticism could take an interest in
• the performance was not recorded, so there is no longer any evidence about what was played on the occasion
• the distinction between composing a work and performing it, which classical practice keeps apart, collapses here

Answer: the distinction between composing a work and performing it, which classical practice keeps apart, collapses here

Where a score exists, the work is standardly identified with something repeatable and the performance is an instance of it. In free improvisation the making and the sounding coincide, so either the work is the performance or there is no work distinct from it — which is a question about the ontology of art, not about recording technology.

On Collingwood's account, an artist who sets out to express an emotion characteristically does not know at the outset what the emotion is. What does this commit him to about the relation between the emotion and the finished work?

• The emotion is fully formed first, and the work then arouses it in an audience
• The emotion is irrelevant, since the work is judged by its form alone
• The emotion belongs to the audience and is read back into the maker
• The emotion becomes determinate only in the act of expressing it

Answer: The emotion becomes determinate only in the act of expressing it

For Collingwood expression is a clarification of something at first felt only as a disturbance, so the work is not a vehicle for a prior state. The option on which a fully formed emotion is then aroused in an audience is closer to Tolstoy's transmission model, and judging by form alone is Bell's formalism — both real positions, placed at the wrong point.