Response to Tyler's "Serious art"

I completely sympathize with your Frankenstein experience. In high-school we spent entire classes dissecting Holden Caulfied's red hunting hat. (While all I wanted was someone to dissect him so he'd stop whining.)
I think that the over-analysis of some works of literature comes from the belief that all narratives have significant philosophy hidden within them. In my American Rennaisance class, (with Prof. Langston, highly recommended,) we're analyzing Emerson and Thoreau. These two authors wrote their opus magnums as works of philosophy with excellent prose. While the next authors we inspected were Melville and Hawthorne, these authors used narrative as a way to slip in obvious political and philosophical comments. These are legitimate uses of intense literature analysis. But when this idea gets applied to every work of literature we can certainly ruin it.
But, how can we tell when it is appropriate to use these techniques? If we don't intensly analyze each piece of great literature we may miss something important!