'...That is saying that you are looking for messages that aren't there. The author creates the character and their actions and their reasons for their actions. The author knows what the character is feeling because he is the character (especially in jds case)...' Although I'm not altogether clear about other bits of your message, that one quoted above seems to me, at least, to be indisputable. Having had no contact with academic linguistics before joining mailing lists such as this one, I was bemused, amused, amazed by the evidently fashionable view that the interpretation of a text or the projection onto it of private fantasies by any jumped-up Tom, Dick or Harriet is potentially as valid as that intended by its author. I can see how attractive this must be in a society - such as the US or Australia - where a remorseless egalitarianism lays its dead hand on the artist ìn his special role as elite avatar - one only to be understood with the most ardent, humble devotion. It remains a position of grotesque & insightless impudence. Scottie B.