We end up missing one of the joys of being human by our concern over the numbers in the computer next to our name. Our lives pass, unique learning opportunities are diminished or missed altogether, and the day comes when we look back and recognize the folly and absurdity of what has happened. I wish more people in the class were mad and madly passionate about wantingto learn. Interpretation and fanciful guessing or self- projection are very different things. That is pure and pristine relativism as well as a position of anti-interpretation.
Interpretation calls for an analysis of the writing, no matter what kind it is.
What is to be gotten out of the writing may indeed be different for different people, but that may say more about the people doing the reading than the text itself. While reading a book, one needs to accept the framework and arguments of the book which means that certain limitations on interpretation start coming into play. Arbitrary and artificial gleanings from the text violate those limitations and boundaries which the text itself establishes. Also, when stating what a book is saying or means, one needs to find support in the book itself for the argument one is making, for it is not enough to simply state what it means without offering evidence and reasons why one says it means what one says it does. Speaking only for myself, as a professor I do not profess to know a whole lot and fully know that I know little.