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I'm currently doing a degree in English lit and can't believe some of the obscure crap that comes out of my lecturers mouths and some of the stuff we have to read. Like Barthes and Bakhtin, they give us this stuff to read, and I think this stuff is riddled with logical flaws, banal comments put in incredibly pretentious language, and plain obscurity and yet none of my lecturers have anything critical to say on these "thinkers" and my fellow "students" lap it like the passive bovines that they are pretty much are. I was once told in the comments I was given on an essay I had done that I had been "too harsh" on Barthes and that this was a flaw with the essay. But it should have nothing to do with whether it's harsh but whether it's wrong or right or well argued!! This is the problem when you have literary critics, some will actually be able to think about what they're reading and be able to criticise, but those people are few and far between.
Another problem with these lecturers/academics is that much of what they say is completely uninteresting and irrelevant and in no way helps to understand a particular piece of literature. It's intellectual masturbation.
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