Jaime,

True, you do say “Interpretations are not absolute” but immediately after that you say “but they can be more or less persuasive”, which seems as if you are not quite committed to the “Interpretations are not absolute” part. If you had said something like: “Interpretations are not absolute, this is why it’s difficult to decide on ultimate meanings outside of a personal exegesis,” then that would be a consistent statement. 

When you say, “Perhaps you don't mean to be nit-picking but this just slows up all conversation”, I was going to say that about you. You can be very tenacious at times, over things that most people would pass by with just an acknowledgement that they disagree with it. 

I don’t see how my second question confuses everything. I was merely attempting to get you to clarify the following statement you made:

“Unless you mean my point that some arguments about literature are more persuasive than others, which of course implies a value judgment. I take them (value judgments) to be universal.”

Your now saying, “I wasn't making any reference to them, except to sweep them away from the present context” doesn’t sit evenly with the above quote. Besides, you have already said, “I don't argue that 'texts can "contain" value judgments and ideological attitudes'”, which was what I was asking you to confirm all along. You might see this as being irrelevant to the discussion but it isn’t, as it is helpful in understanding where you are coming from in terms of your view that ultimate meanings can be decided upon via reasoning that can be (using your word) “persuasive”. I don’t think my attempt at gaining some clarification from you on this matter is, as say, a straw man approach.

When you say:

“Only at end of your post can I see any advance in the discussion. You can accept that other people's views might be more persuasive on novels and films, but not on poems. It seems odd, and very arbitrary, that you make this distinction, but somehow it doesn't surprise me.”

It shouldn’t seen odd at all. I place poetry in a special category, simply because it places itself in a category whereby language is purposely used ambiguously. This is less the case with novels and films, which largely aim at clarity for narrative purposes. Of course, there are novels and films that resist this (increasingly fewer as the years go by) but those novels and films are really poetic works by other means.

You say that,

“it leaves me perplexed as to why you should bother to write any critical essays or articles. Presumably if all of your readers held the same immobility of response, they would remain obdurately unconvinced by anything you argue unless it coincided exactly with their own established view. The whole activity would be futile.”

I don’t know why you say this, as I had already said in answer to your question (“Have you never had your personal response to a poem (or novel or film etc.) changed by contact with another person’s opinion or argument? For the present discussion, let’s say by a critical essay. If so, what has happened to this “problematical” meeting of text and reader?”), that other people’s views on novels, films, essays etc., can change me. So I would hope that my essays could do the same for them.