Anybody looking for another literary-jargon-free guide to reading ought to check out Break, Blow, Burn from Salon's own Camille Paglia, a walk through 43 lyric poems, from classics like Shakespeare's sonnets to Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock".

It has nothing to do with any "new" value to be derived from looking at the old "text" in a new way. It is academia reinventing itself, just like a toothpaste product that is "new and improved" in order to sell more toothpaste. Gee, if we just kept reading the books and appreciating them for the wonderful stories and images and (gasp!) insights into the author's life and times, then what would there be to publish? It's all been said, along those lines. So, in order to have something new to publish-or-perish about, academics come up with tortured "new" ways of looking at things, conveniently dragging their personal politics into the picture at the same time.

It makes me sick.

I didn't know what "Plus ca change" meant; I had to look it up. Isn't this just the sort of thing that's so annoying to the "new throng"?

But even if the author wants to stand by his snobbish use of an obscure, partial French saying, shouldn't the editors italicize it so that the masses don't think it is just a typo of some sort?

I hate reading your articles. So depressing. And you nail it. The depressing truth.

How much we have changed. "It's not the BJ, it's the perjury", they railed. And I had to agree. Now it's not the perjury...it's the outing of a covert CIA agent couldn't be proven as a crime??

And that's not dark enough for you Sidney. And I must follow you into the darkness. Hate it...but thanks.

Plus ca change = "Obscure"?!

Oh, my.

You're tryin' too hard to make Lutz out to be a big, bad inneleckshul. Unless you're, like, a anti-inneleckshul.

Virginia Woolf was right. Of course no one can teach you to read.

I obtained a degree with a major in English many years ago, and have been a lifelong reader, but the truth is that there are very few books that are really worth reading, and the ones that are need to be read over and over again at different times of your life, because as you mature your perceptions and understanding change, usually for the better.

Schools of criticism come and go, but the only thing that really counts is that you form a personal relationship with the author and share the contents of his/her imagination and experience, even though your lives may be distant in both time and place.

Exactly which books become important to an individual is obviously impossible to predict, but at the undergraduate level all that can be hoped for is that the student gains some familiarity with the major voices of various periods, and possibly learn enough to be able to discern that James Frey, regardless of the historical truth of his narrative (if any), is probably not a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

His collection of Essays "How to Be Alone" has a great essay about why we read novels in it. I highly suggest it.

And to Mr. Lutz, thanks for the good read.

I'm a professor teaching literature at an R1 university, so I suppose I'm on the front lines of this particular controversy. But I also teach popular culture, and I have noticed that while my students will willingly adopt the most esoteric, jargon-laden criticism of a dusty old literary "classic," when it comes to analyzing film, TV, comic books, or anything low-brow, they resist. With the things they really love, they just want to revel in the pleasure of viewing or reading, and recount their favorite scenes or details. And they get really upset when I suggest in any way that these things they love are somehow not perfect. In short, they want to approach those texts as fans, not as scholars. It strikes me that all these how-to-read guides are attempting to do the same thing: they are trying to get the TV-addicted masses to become fans of highbrow, canonical literature. Well, good luck with that.

But as I constantly remind my students, you don't need to take a class to be a fan. What I teach them is something different: how to respond critically to the culture that surrounds them. Why are women portrayed a certain way in this book? Who benefits from characterizing an ethnic group this way? Whose voice gets heard in the dominant culture, and what is repressed or silenced? In answering these kinds of questions, if it take specialized jargon to do it, and if it sometimes presents classic literature as less than perfect, then so be it. But jargon and critcizing the classics are the by-product of critical inquiry, not an end in themselves. We all live in a media-saturated enviroment, and we need the critical skills to decode the messages we are bombarded with daily.

Prose's book is mainly for people trying to write novels of their own.

I think deconstruction and Femi-Marxi-etc and all that has served a definite purpose. Fiction expresses power, and people need to be able to talk to and about power.

But talking to power is not what helps a struggling novelist figure out how the make the decisions involved in actually writing a novel.

So of course the author of this article -- somone who traded his dream of writing novels for the power and security of a job pimping theory -- would find her book annoying.

Personally, I find it helps me understand why I like these authors. What makes their work tick? How can I make my work take off like theirs?

"Wow Tom; hard to believe you haven't written a novel!" Though his voice was tinged with sarcasm he worried that his friend may not have picked up on it. "Seriously Tommy, I love you but you just need to shut up and write. Look at me; I don't read anymore and I work in a bank but already I'm 300 pages into a novel. And unless you put some words onto paper my novel will always be better than yours."