Amazon.com: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction: Books: Robert Olen Butler,Janet Burroway

It seems to me that a lot of literature classes go wrong because the teachers, unintentionally but often intentionally, give the impression that writers are rather like idiots savants: they really want to say abstract, theoretical, philosophical things, but somehow they can’t quite make themselves do it. So they create these objects whose ultimate meaning and relevance and value come into being only after they have been subjected to the analysis of thoughtful literary critics. . . In how many literature classes have you heard it asked, “What does this work mean?” As if it had no meaning in the mere reading of it. (p. 108)