Regardless, if there was an attempt to "keep Maya Angelou out," it certainly failed. My comment about "the definition of literature" was about Eat Pray Love not Maya Angelou. My point was that literature (or art) is not "something that makes people feel good".
The notion that art can't be "good" if it makes people feel good is really misguided, in my opinion. People turn to art for all kinds of reasons, but most of all because of the satisfaction involved in consuming it. Even if a story is tragic or explores sorrowful experiences, we derive aesthetic pleasure from the recounting if it is well done. Art is not cheerleading, but neither does it need to be just some predictable narrative about how life is terrible and hopeless.
Speaking of literature, I don't think that reading of the parent comment is correct. The comment was saying that "making people feel good does not make it art/literature," where you're discussing something else, which is "making people feel good makes it not art/literature".
The original comment was something like, "Perhaps Eat Pray Love made people's lives better, but making peoples lives better does not make it art/literature."
Of course, people do have reactions to art. But that doesn't change the artistic value of the original piece. If they did, then the artistic value of something would change over time, which seems counter-intuitiive to me.
The interplay between the artist and the consumer of their art is a separate piece of art in itself, which may or may not have been "designed" by the artist.
But art is the product of a vision, the result of some internal feeling. Sometimes their vision is likeable, and that's a happy coincidence. Other times it's not, but maybe the artist gives up a little bit of their vision in order to make it more likeable. At some point, they've sold so much of it that you can't really call the product art any more.