Pat
"The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is — what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used."
C.S. Lewis
"One of the major flaws in some forms of reader-response criticism is that they tend to ignore the compact between author and audience, overlook that the author had some purpose and information to convey when he wrote the document, and assume that it is the reader who can and must decide what sorts of things, including what sort of meaning, one can derive from a text."
Ben Witherington III
http://blog.beliefnet.com/bibleandculture/