[photonthug]

Comprehension is a spectrum that starts somewhere superficial and merely "adequate" but also stretches into deeper literacy/fluency. On one end of the spectrum it is about reading between the lines, but that doesn't mean it's purely subjective nonsense. As for whether it's interesting or valuable, if you want to stay on the surface that's fine, but it's a narrow point of view to imagine that's all that is there.

Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

[cxr]

You're dug in, but none of this is what the linked paper is about (perversely).

It's about students who are literally unable to parse sentence structure and grasp what's being described in a scene—ones who think that Michaelmas Term is the name of a character and that the image of a hypothetical Megolasaurus walking up the street is an actual dinosaur in the scene.

Try reading the paper linked here to see what the discussion is about, rather than (as the authors of the paper criticize) just guessing at what they should have meant.