Quote Originally Posted by DomaDoma View Post
How many works function without things outside their own context? You can't understand half of Uncle Tom's Cabin without a basic grounding in Christianity (ideally one that knows the significance of Methodism in the nineteenth century). Clifford the Big Red Dog requires a working knowledge of regular proportions. Even that one wretched professor of mine who thought The Tempest was about colonialism in the Caribbean had to supply an outside context to make that point.

Nah. The wholesale silencing of the author in particular is completely arbitrary. Not to mention unnecessary. I have my personal application for the finale to Little Shop of Horrors, and it's enriched my perspective on the world. I find no damage is done by admitting that it is a personal application.
He phrased it poorly. It would be better stated that you shouldn't give undue weight to the opinion of the author just because he put the thing to text.

Ray Bradbury may have been thinking about his perceived dangers of TV and radio when he wrote Fahrenheit 451, but that doesn't mean the warnings about censorship aren't there, or that the TV-critical aspects aren't fairly weak by comparison, for example.