>>/7339/
> you ... know you're effectively agreeing with me here, right?
as a standalone phrase, I agree. Within the context that was said here, I don´t share it. 

> Maybe it's just the impetuousness of youth that insists the art and the artist can be taken separately. Or maybe that was a postmodernism that I never actually ascribed to

actually, no. The theory of this comes from a teacher who is specialized in literature and it deals with the roots of what´s literature (both the theory and its criticism)

Perhaps this discussion stems from the theory itself. Because for judging properly a work, the interpreter should be qualified enough in order to judge scientifically a piece of work without entering into doxology, moral or ideological territories...that is to say, said interpreter would have to study quite a lot for avoiding those traps and the scientific research of a creative work requires a systematical organization in terms of form and matter, connecting all the elements that come into play.

Literature doesn´t exist within the postmodern world because everything for a postmodern interpreter has to be related with phenomenology and psychology which prevent the interpreter to see any form of literature, therefore, the philosophical materialism theory considers that postmodern literature is an oxymoron by itself.

Now, what you´ve referred to the rest of your post means that...

> Not disagreeing. Or at least, the unicorns in the audience would know you're faking it.
> It's like writing about dreams -- it exposes your subconscious, which is unfamiliar with/bad-at lying.
> Being 45 might affect this conversation. 
> What I've seen, mostly, is that the more they try to hide / lie / twist their presentation, the more they present themselves openly.

whatever you and I discuss...is doomed to not be literature and thus, we all have already entered into a hellhole that no one knows how to escape. We´ll never arrive at the actual form of interpreting it scientifically because we are all insisting in the psychological/phenomenological matter (especially the former) 

As much as people want to criticize postmodernism, it seems that we (neither does 95-99% of the population really) aren´t doing any favor to get rid of it and you´re 45 (almost doubling my age, by the way). Your education and values (while postmodernism wasn´t completely shaped during the 70s) might have avoided many holes that postmodernism holds but it seems discussions like these prove that we are, in reality, pedestrians pretending to be intellectuals. Whatever we say here, it´s going to fall into postmodern territory for not making a proper research and judging/reviewing in a biased manner a postmodern franchise (consumption for the masses) such as this one (coming from the 80s)

We can all argue and end up staying convinced within our comfort zone but we won´t arrive at any intellectual approach of taking things in a scientific manner for taking the psychology of the author into account and taking any kind of relativism into account within the research (much less if said material was produced during this period). 

And by we...I mean that no user is exceptional here from falling into the traps of postmodernism (not even the prompter).