Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

But if you are trying to remove all the cultural context from the text, which includes the authorial intent, then what is the point of analysing it at all? You either end up just analysing the cultural context of the reader, which may have value but it is a rather indirect way to go about it, or you also try to remove the cultural context of the reader and end up with something that is so narrow, so personal to the individual analyst that it can only serve as an exercise in logical thinking. Again, not without value in itself but rather irrelevant as regards actual literature.

A text is not a thing floating in free space, it's not equivalent to pure mathematics, it is entirely imbued with its cultural context. And since the authorial intent is the medium through which that cultural context is transmitted, it is surely of great interest and value to learn as much about it as is possible. Of course you can't ever find the complete 'truth' any more, but that doesn't mean the parts you can find are unimportant.