Regarding "Theme"

After I read Perrine's (I do not know who the specific author was so the subject for the remainder of the rant will be referred to as "Perrine".) breakdown of theme on Monday, I've been considering many of his arguments over the week. I've tried understanding his point of view, but I'm close to giving up. I understand that it's important to set aside literary works from commercial ones, but it's one thing to divide the literary world into two separate spheres, and another to never allow the two to overlap. It's rather pretentious to cast away a horror story or a science fiction tale as nothing worthy of literary merit because their purpose isn't to reveal a profound truth. I instinctively shutter when I read the passage taking a stance on how a theme exists only when an author has deliberately introduced a concept or theory of life. In my 10th grade honors literature class, where the basis of my understanding of literature stems from, I was taught that the author is dead. It doesn't matter what they wanted to say, or how overreaching the theme was intended to be. They do not matter. When the reader - yes, I am the reader - interprets a book, I bring more of myself to the analytical process than I bring in what was going on in the author's life or time period. In Frankenstein, I couldn't care any less that Mary Shelley had lost her mother or her children before writing the book. To me, Frankenstein is a cautionary tale of fixation on perfection. I'd love to discuss the abortion or masturbatory imagery and consider it a central theme, but I feel like that's impossible when following Perrine's guidelines to theme. Sometimes a theme doesn't have to be skull cracking-ly deep. In fact, I don't want them to. The themes that stick with me the most, that I actually consider in real life while examining my surroundings, and not in literature circles, are the ones that are so simple, they can be expressed in a short phrase like "Crap happens" or "sometimes there is no point". Cliched themes are cliched because society fails to change them. Perrine channels Oscar Wilde when he claims that an author must "seriously attempt to record life accurately or reveal some truth about it". Author's intention has nothing to do with it, especially due to how incompetent they can sometimes be. Unintentional themes are often better than the ones that are deliberately forced. Spring Breakers, a party movie, gave me more insight on the dangers of hedonism and mindless pop culture than what the director wanted me to take from it.  Oscar Wilde said that an artist's, or writer's, duty is to hold up a mirror to nature or man; however, Oscar Wilde contradicts himself and shouldn't be trusted. In the end, of his preface in The Picture of Dorian Gray he says that "all art is quite useless". There obviously are no rules set for establishing the way to interpret art for the whole literary world. In an AP Literature classroom, it's dangerous to narrow the possibilities of interpreting a text by forcing the reader to consider what universal, long lost truth that is hidden inside all of us. How can you expect that all truth's must be revealed and not taught? In The Book of the Grotesque, Anderson writes of how the world is made up of infinite truths that man makes for himself. Sometimes, perspectives must be taught, as they haven't been considered. I don't buy into the whole inherent connection that humans are born with. Babies are blank slates. Even more, teenage readers are impressionable and haven't considered every angle to life. If truths are never taught, only revealed, and the reader is either culturally illiterate, or has only been "revealed/reminded" by profound, often vague, truths, then themes wouldn't be very insightful, or descriptive. I think it's a step backwards. Sorry for the angry rant, it's just been boiling inside of me. If you think that I missed the point to Perrine's discussion on Theme, let me know. Maybe it just needs to be revealed to me.