Well, literary criticism tends to be rather heedless of the author's conscious intentions.
[...]
Which is why I've never had much respect for Literary Criticism.
[...]
I lost all respect for Literary Criticism when I saw someone try to apply Freud to a work (in the name of Literary Criticism), and claim that it meant something. Discussing the Freudian imagery of a work may be an amusing game, but it can't tell you what it means, any more than phrenology will tell you what a person is like.
But this suggests that what the author intended the work to mean is the only possible meaning -- which seems a bit problematic when one considers that readers/viewers are bringing widely different backgrounds and experiences to a work and that the work itself (assuming it lasts) is being seen in a different time period from that in which it was created. Some of the discussions about females (especially Meegat) in B7 point out the problems in the latter -- looking at 1970s females in light of 21st-century attitudes toward women; in terms of the former, the continuing debates about almost every aspect of the series (especially Avon and Blake) would again show that different people extract different things from the series. Those viewers are finding meaning in the stories, are finding coherent interpretations of character and motivation that fit with their perception of the world -- how is that not "tell[ing] . . . what it means"?
Rejecting all but an author's conscious intentions also seems to imply that the unconscious doesn't come into play when writing, yet various authors' comments would suggest otherwise. I believe it was Katherine Paterson who mentioned that it wasn't until she was asked about the plot of one of her later works (#9 or #10 or thereabouts) that she suddenly realized she'd been writing the same core story time and again, even though the individual settings and circumstances varied widely. That core story -- sometimes less obvious in the plot, sometimes the central tale -- would thus seem to be an important part of the "meaning" of her writing, but not one she'd consciously intended to be there.
DDJ