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Jajasoon's remarks on "intention" are well-taken.  Some further thoughts,
appropriated largely from questions of *literary* intention:
 
1. Re-read Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy."  This essay
was a cornerstone of the New Criticism, and althought it overstates its
case (especially in elevating intention to a "fallacy") still makes some
valid points--which aren't that much at odds with the origianl post:
If the work coheres in a particular way, then *that* was what was intended
regardless of what the author might say.  (Of course, that begs the question
of whether a work can "cohere" in only one particular way.)
 
2. Artists Forget.  Henry James re-edited most of his works and provided
long prefaces to them in which he "explained" them.  These essays (collected
in THE ART OF FICTION) are useful but not to be trusted as sole explanations.
For example, James asserts that his novel WHAT MAISIE KNEW was written
ten years *after* it was published--if he can't get his facts straight, then
what can he say about his intent?
 
3. Artists Lie.  William Faulkner (who was a master at spinning tales about
his own life) once was at a seminar where a student asked the meaning of
the title LIGHT IN AUGUST.  Faulkner replied that he was referring literallyt
to a certain quality of light to be found in the Deep South in late summer.
The student replied, "Oh, that's too bad!  I've heard that there's an
expression used by pregnant women saying that they'll be "light" when they
give birth (and a birth is of central importance to Faulkner's book).
Faulkner liked *that* explanation so much that he started using it himself!
 
4. Artists Like to Let the Audience Guess.  Wallace Stevens once replied
to yet another seminar that two interpretations of "The Emperor of Ice
Cream" were equally valid, though quite at odds.  Robert Frost liked to
assert that "Stopping By Woods" just "meant" that "It was cold as Hell and
I wanted to get out of there."  He also wrote, "It takes a lot of in-
and outdoor schooling/to get adapted to my kind of fooling."  And have you
seen the interviews that Peter Bogdanovich ran with John Ford, where for
days PB would ask Ford why he did certain things and Ford would answer
curtly, "Because I want to!" or even "Did I do that?", until after several
days the shell cracked and he began to admit that there were reasons for
his choices.
 
Certainly, we need to acknowledge the role of collaboration--and it *is*
easy to "overinterpret" a work from a particular perspective.  (Just look
at the backflips New Critics would do to admit favorite works into the
Canon, when they didn't quite fit New Critical criteria.)  Nonetheless,
we can't *help* interpreting--even a statement like, "Oh, that didn't really
mean anything except that it should be enjoyed" is an interpretation!
 
Or, as T.S. Eliot put it, "Criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and
. . . we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our
minds when we read a book [or see a film?] and feel an emotion [or have an
idea?] about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of
criticism."
 
--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN