-I do not think any of them differ. You look at the essay, the poem and the Symposium much like you do any other piece of work. You look at the basic content provided, then you take it a step further if needed and try to interpret it for deeper meanings. Then once that is done, you must analyze it based on that interpretation. So the only thing that seems to differ is the content by which those works are based on. When interpreting philosophy, you remove the core belief it is founded on and then compare it to other philosophical works that incorporate those same ideas. I have a limited understanding of poetry, so I cannot speak on its behalf in a deep sense. But it seems as though people interpret poetry based on the individual poet, not the idea. So the poem being interpreted would be compared to other poetry by that poet and the period in his life in which he or she wrote it.
I think you are correct in saying that all literary criticism and interpretation is intertextual. Even if we try to suspend the influences of our prior experiences and knowledge in the attempt to approach the text as a self-contained entity--the New Critics suggested we do-- we invariably seek recourse to an external method if only in the way we unify the text's substance through a particular paradigm. It is important to point out the unconscious role our paradigms and psychological gestalts play in the way we understand a text. In acknowledging the boundaries our paradigms delineate in our apperception of reality, we come to realize that meaning is established not by proceeding from the part to the whole, but by fleshing out the whole through the unification of its parts, which are inscribed within the bounds of a reader's paradigmatic terminus. So, the distinctions to be made are not between disciplines such as poetry and philosophy, or art and science, but between the incommensurable criteria of individual paradigms that create the possibility of pluralistically valid interpretations of a single text or phenomenon.
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