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Often the designated textbook will be little more than a portmanteau of trends with a brief supplementary introduction appended at its beginning. The selection may vary, but the general approach is likely to be uniform within quite narrowly defined parameters.
Such courses may be useful in offering a working model of the changes of fashion in literary theory, but they are relatively ineffective as an aid to reading. Often a too-rapid acquisition of partial knowledge forecloses what might have been an untroubled openness of response, treating the literary text as though it were a problem to be solved by the application of formulae, and a reader’s response as though it were the first term of a syllogism.
The condition of the reader with more than a passing knowledge of theory may be even less happy than that of the newcomer engaging with alien thoughts, since an enthusiast is more likely than a beginner submitting to an unfamiliar discipline to narrow possibility to a set of pre-existing preferences. Both paths arrive at the same destination, however. Whether we consider the conscientious enquirer in pursuit of a decent grade or a zealot possessed by an idée fixe, the end result is that the reading of literature in our systems of education is often experienced as a task to be transacted, rather than a pleasure to be savoured.
The way the study of literature has come to be perceived across the board compounds this distress. Over the last few decades especially, there has been a general lowering of literature’s importance as a subject deserving of serious concerted study. At many levels and in a number of ways, literary studies has either pandered to the acculturation of timid souls wrongly supposed not to be much good for anything else, or it has tried to clamber aboard an ill-decorated, bells-and-whistles float in the grand parade of popular culture, too intent on projecting an image which will find acceptance to test its underpinnings, too nervous of its own reflection for self-scrutiny. This reorientation from the intensity of enquiry which characterized much of the better work done on both sides of the Atlantic and in Europe in the previous century represents an alarming degradation of what we take literature to be, as well as the way we read it.