Prof. Willett,
Certainly positivist approaches to linguistic artifacts can yield useful and sometimes insightful information. But I would just like to say that approaches that eschew biological reductionism in favor of what looks like more "mystical" methods can *also* provide insight, and pleasure, particularly when the objects of inquiry are products of the creative imagination. The Euphuistic style of early modern poetics depends upon, *requires* a type of readerly interaction with text that is not about conscious "translation." The parallelism, the alliteration, the whole emphasis on what sherry calls "schemes" (non-conceptual figures of language) works on the reader at the level of unconscious or at least semi-conscious hearing and affect, *not* at the level of "thinking." To read such a text with a determination to find objectivity is to fail to interact with the text on its own terms; it is to fail to have an interaction that might have been a moment of musical seduction.
In short, I respect your convictions, but feel that your wholesale, emotional rejection of anything other than those convictions is unfair and unnecessarily limiting.
Best, as usual,
Stephen
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