> It suggests to me that there is one ironclad valid meaning behind a book, which is the author's, and anybody who doesn't "get" it may as well not have read the book.
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No room for indeterminancy or self-interpretation... ah, the bane of many poetry classes! Yes, I know the original essay we're talking about was about prose, but it reminds me strongly of something the professor in my Study of 20th Century Poetry course said yesterday - about how often in poetry there are many different interpretations possible, and how we do the author a disservice by locking the piece into a box and labeling it "THIS means THIS, and ONLY this". Dissecting the heck out of poetry in this way takes a lot of the fun out of it.

To illustrate this, my professor read us a very good poem addressing this... in the poem, the speaker directs people to hold a poem up to the light and peer through it, to drop a mouse into a poem and see where it leads, to waterski on the surface of a poem and wave at the author's name on the shore - but then laments that all people seem to do is tie a poem to a chair and beat it in order to extract a confession from it. Funny, but also apt. When I get a chance, I'll see if I can find that poem online and post a link.

Sosi"could ramble on more about indeterminacy, synecdoche, and other stuff, but won't"qui