Lit Crit Dramblings

The postmodern, post structuralist, deconstructive approach is wrong.

There is absolute truth and meaning in the created work. Any piece of creativity does have inherent and infused meaning and it is unfair to the creator to decide that there is no meaning or that every meaning is equally valid. The creator organically developed the creation starting from beneath the surface within a fertile context.  It then grew out, based on those roots, organically developing from its situation.

If that is then taken by someone else and grafted onto a different life experience, while it might be perfectly valid and reasonable to say that the resultant product is valid or that what came out of the situation and the meaning that developed from that is just as good as anything else, and while it's nice to say that, you can't say that it is better or that it is preferred or even that it is equally as valid as the one that the author had in mind, because the author has to be primary; give him 50.1% and if you want the other whatever the math, is that's fine. But he has to have the primary meaning creation privilege.

That transactional thing that is made by the reader has its own life and that's very nice but it has its own life as the creation of the field of experience of the reader so it cannot replace, it cannot overwhelm the one that was born with the writing of the original creation. It's perfectly fair to say that regarding an author who's not accessible, we cannot know the author's intent with certainty, but we can use detective like skills to figure his context out and maybe get establish some foundation for meaning in an almost historicist sense, bits that might have contributed in his consciousness, the way he used words (maybe because of the vocabulary of the time) and other things like the cultural references. We can assume that he must mean certain things or at least could not mean other things that are anachronistic or culturally inappropriate. Use extant decipherable variables and try to intuit what the author might have meant while also being aware of what the text means to you as reader.