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An excellent summary of your considered attitude and practice to a close reading of any text.
Sprinkled throughout many discussions in a most helpful teaching/learning process. Thanks.

I do not think that interpreting a text is like modeling the origins of the universe. The former addresses the audience the latter does not. I do not regard interpretation of a text as either representing or constructing truth, but rather as opening up what is there to be found — Fooloso4

Could you elaborate on the difference between addressing an audience in textual interpretation and not addressing an audience in modeling the origin of the universe? Doesn’t one participate within a set of scientific practices and address a particular community of fellow scientists when constructing theory? Do we not find what we put there in doing science? That is , we discover from within a web of practices and devices that produce not just the means but the substrate of what is to be found.

So too, current concerns and goals can get in the way of understanding the concerns and goals of the author. In my opinion an author who is at a distance from us in time and place may have something to teach us that our contemporaries cannot. The fact that they saw things differently can be of value — Fooloso4

In modernist thinking one’s current goals and concerns act as a distortion of the text’s author’s ‘original’ aims, and one should try one’s best to separate these, so as to appreciate the different way an older author saw things with as little contamination from our overlaid experiences as possible. But aren’t the author’s original aims also interpreted via one’s current goals and aims? This is called the hermeneutic circle, which Heidegger discusses in Being and Time.

“Scientific proof must not already pre­suppose what its task is to found. But if interpretation always already has
to operate within what is understood and nurture itself from this, how should it then produce scientific results without going in a circle, espe­cially when the presupposed understanding still operates in the common knowledge of human being and world? But according to the most ele­mentary rules of logic, the circle is a circulus vitios'lis. But the business of historical interpretation is thus banned a priori from the realm of exact knowledge. If the fact of the circle in understanding is not removed, his­toriography must be content with less strict possibilities of knowledge. … It would be more ideal, of course, moreover according to the opinion of the historiographers themselves, if the circle could be avoided and if there were the hope for once of creating a his­toriography which is· as independent of the standpoint of the observer as the knowledge of nature is supposed to be.
But to see a vitiosum in this circle and to look for ways to avoid it, even to"feel" that is an inevitable imperfection, is to misunderstand understanding from the ground up….

What is decisive is not to get out of
the circle, but to get in it in the right way.“

Could you elaborate on the difference between addressing an audience in textual interpretation and not addressing an audience in modeling the origin of the universe? — Joshs

I meant the text itself addressing an audience.

But aren’t the author’s original aims also interpreted via one’s current goals and aims? This is called the hermeneutic circle, which Heidegger discusses in Being and Time. — Joshs

Gadamer talks about the fusion of horizons.

What should not be overlooked is the influence of Heidegger on scholars like Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein. Their reading of Plato stands in stark contrast to the prevailing interpretations at that time.

Gadamer talks about the fusion of horizons. — Fooloso4

Since the OP concerns the postmodern, I thought I’d mention Shaun Gallagher’s interesting paper, Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics , in which he tries to steer a course between Gadamer’s approach and Lyotard’s paralogy.

“A postmodern hermeneutics would be one that is free from the Romantic conceptions of humanity
and trust.
Lyotard's distrust of metalepsis indicates that in postmodern hermeneutics the fusion of horizons which would efface the differences between the self and the other must be displaced by a conception of linking that includes the impossibility of complete fusion, along with
the possibility of an agonistic refusal to be fused, as well as the possibility of progressive dialogue.

Metalepsis is the transformation of an observer left outside the conversation into a participant through his judgment about the conversation. When Socrates speaks to Thrasymachus, Plato intends for the reader to enter into the same conversation. We enter into the conversation, Gadamer would contend, through this metalepsis in which we judge whether Socrates or
Thrasymachus is right. For Gadamer, every time one reads Plato one enters into a conversation that is fused with the Socratic dialogue. Lyotard, in contrast, equates metalepsis with an absorption of the difference that exists between agonistics (debate) and dialogue, two
incommensurable genres. For Lyotard, it is "never certain nor even probable that partners in a debate, even those taken as witness to a dialogue, convert themselves into partners in dialogue".

Rather, what is certain here is that we end up with more than one conversation, each structured in its own genre, with different participants, and different senses. Despite Gadamer's addiction to metalepsis, this paralogical result is not inconsistent with Gadamer's own principle that we always understand differently. In doing so, however, we do not enter into the original conversation, but create a new one for ourselves.”

For Lyotard, it is "never certain nor even probable that partners in a debate, even those taken as witness to a dialogue, convert themselves into partners in dialogue". — Joshs

Do you have a body of text from Lyotard that you could link to give a better view of his thinking? Academic journals give references to his work, but I cannot find a source open to the general public.

In doing so, however, we do not enter into the original conversation, but create a new one for ourselves.” — Joshs

How would you know this had happened unless you're capable of entering the original conversation to see that it's different from the one you created?

Your question is a good one.
In the Republic, Glaucon wants to get to an end and be done with the matter. Socrates turns that desire into a new problem. But it is still the old problem too.

Kierkegaard's point was that Christianity is a dead religion. — Tate

This expression does not fit with any of the text I have read. It contradicts the argument in Philosophical Fragments. It turns the Works of Love into a cruel joke. I think you are mistaken.