The Canon In Remission

The death of the critic - I am picturing 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters producing "literary criticism:" Richard Poirier - A Man of Good Reading

Mr. Poirier’s most important contribution came in his criticism, which tried to convey why the act of reading is — and should be — so difficult. The most powerful works of literature, he insisted, offer “a fairly direct access to pleasure” but become “on longer acquaintance, rather strange and imponderable.” Even as readers try to pin down what a writer means, the best authors try to elude them, using all the resources of sound, rhythm and syntax to defeat any straightforward account of what they are doing.

That is, in a nutshell, why I gave up on stdying literature as a vocation. You literally have to spend your days reeading that sort of BS, rather than read "Romola" for the 10th time. The best literature is remarkably straight forward. If the reader finds a "classic" to be elusive, it is because of the inevitable anachronisms or because the reader finds something in the work he doesn't like (such as a politically incorrect theme) and resists enjoying the work on that basis. But to claim that a work must be read until it is imponderable is to remove all pleasure from what is ultimately meant to be a pleasant diversion.