How to read a writing and write a reading?

It seems to me that when we attempt to analyse some text in a scholarly way, we can either read (the) writing and then write (some) writing, or read (someone's or our) reading and then write (a) reading. In all four cases, what we ultimatley do is write a reading. But a reading of what exactly?

The main question that is often decided well in advance, but is rarely given any thought, is whether we focus on the writing process of the text, or on how the text is being read. In the first case, the ultimate goal is to reconstruct the compositional process in its own historical context; to consider sources that the author was familiar with at the time of writing, to unearth influences and contemporary links to outside events. This approach, in other words, is author-centred: it seeks to understand a piece based on its author. Everything might be relevant to the work that had happened to its author prior to the genesis of the text, but nothing can be taken into account about which it cannot be shown that it had something to do with the writer.

The second way considers the effect of a work on a reader; as a special case, a present-day reader might be selected for this purpose. This approach is free to take into account, for example, any literary parallel it discovers with texts that were written after the work under scrutiny, as it focuses on what a reader may know, not what the author did know. It, however, should refrain from considering any biographical or other information its supposed reader is unlikely to be familiar with without calling attention to its doing so. When this approach tries to analyse how a text affects a reader, it should avoid modelling the ideal reader who has access to every piece of relevant information and every prior reading of the given text.

Let me note that this dichotomy is different from the one that arises if one contrasts New Criticism to New Historicism; reading without author and context and reading with them. For New Historicism may be reading a reading, provided it (re)constructs a reader contemporary with the author, who has access to every current idea, interpretation, and connotation. While it will stick to the context of the artwork for an interpretation, it might not limit itself to its author.

Whether we read/write the writing or the reading is a question so basic that it seldom gets addressed directly. But it should be. For if an analysis in a paper oscillates between the two approaches to make the best of both, it will end up telling us nothing either about the author or about any existing reader. It will only tell us something about one reader: the author of the paper. And that's all.