I am always interested in what the author thinks his or her book is about. A few months ago I listened to a university lecture on Flannery O’Connor in itunes. If I remember correctly, the lecturer said that, although O’Connor herself said that much of her work had a religious theme, what she was really writing about was racism and sexism and not religion at all. I disagree. Her settings reflected the culture of their times, not necessarily making a value judgment. But the university professors know better. It’s all Marxist-Feminism, all the time. One of the biggest and most destructive college lies is contemporary literary criticism.
Well, that’s your problem. You are assuming that the author of a book actually has a better idea of what the book is about than some marxist professor with a bunch of letters after his name. After all, if people are just going to listen to the AUTHOR when trying to figure out what the author is saying, why would we even need these English professors anyway. :)
It’s called literary deconstruction, and it flows from writings and theories of French marxist professors Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The cliffnotes version is that you can take any writing and use it to advance your own narrative (a big Obama term) about life, society, history etc. The idea that once in public the author/creator loses any control over his/her work and its entire meaning may be altered at the discretion of the reader. This is exactly what your professor did with Flannery o’Connor’s work
I remember taking an American Literature class and being introduced to a poet named Frank Marshall Davis. His most famous poem they decided to include in the anthology was about a black man who works at a rich, white country club who witnesses what can only be described as a homosexual orgy where these white guys were throwing around money and other tokens of white man's wealth.
I thought it was disgusting and I wondered why anyone would consider that poem and the author worthy of inclusion in an anthology of great poets.
Lo and behold, that disgusting guy is a hero of marxism and personally mentored another disgusting guy named Barack Obama.