It tires me out listening to long sentences that sound like English but lack all meaning. And resistance isn't easy. Where there is noparaphrasable meaning, dissent is impossible, because there is no threshold for attack. I stop talking in seminars altogether. No one has mentioned enjoying a book.
Analysis is practised completely free of evaluation.
Manifestly, analysis is more important than the texts themselves. In a class on The Canterbury Tales , the secondary literature dwarfs the Tales . We are asked to review books on Chaucer, and even review reviews of books on Chaucer. I see an infinite sequence of mirrors into which Chaucer has disappeared. In the lift down from the English department, I ask one professor what is on her bedside table.