02-12-2013, 07:50 AM
You misunderstand. As a student of history, I enjoy finding out details of people's lives. When it comes to reading their text, however, I will often read for a specific purpose, from a particular perspective, employing a set of critical theories. I am quite versatile and can actually manage to read a text in a variety of different ways 
. The set of theories I most often find myself employing, however, are post-structuralist -- I don't deliberately keep myself ignorant of the writer's life, but to the best of my ability I distance myself from it and read the text in the now. I don't think it should be necessary for a text to carry a massive appendix explaining the writer's motivation, perspective, psychotic state or whatever. A text should/must speak to the reader through the reader's own filters or it has failed for that reader only. If it continues to fail for multiple readers without lengthy explanations on the part of the writer or the writer's apologists, then it's probably fair to say that it's a crap text. And yes, that is the accepted metalanguage.
As to science, I employ it a great deal in my writing as well. I understand it in my own terms, which occasionally agree with the terms of the experts, though science has that wonderful trait of being fluid and accepting various viewpoints. A good part of my understanding of the world is in scientific terms and I see nothing wrong with using science, as Todd does, to explore the metaphysical. I have not, to date, stumbled upon the Grand Unified Theory via poetry... I have found evidence of dark matter, but this is not the place to discuss what exists in the mind of emo slasher poets...
. The set of theories I most often find myself employing, however, are post-structuralist -- I don't deliberately keep myself ignorant of the writer's life, but to the best of my ability I distance myself from it and read the text in the now. I don't think it should be necessary for a text to carry a massive appendix explaining the writer's motivation, perspective, psychotic state or whatever. A text should/must speak to the reader through the reader's own filters or it has failed for that reader only. If it continues to fail for multiple readers without lengthy explanations on the part of the writer or the writer's apologists, then it's probably fair to say that it's a crap text. And yes, that is the accepted metalanguage.As to science, I employ it a great deal in my writing as well. I understand it in my own terms, which occasionally agree with the terms of the experts, though science has that wonderful trait of being fluid and accepting various viewpoints. A good part of my understanding of the world is in scientific terms and I see nothing wrong with using science, as Todd does, to explore the metaphysical. I have not, to date, stumbled upon the Grand Unified Theory via poetry... I have found evidence of dark matter, but this is not the place to discuss what exists in the mind of emo slasher poets...
It could be worse