Literature has no more value than Mills & Boon

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Same mistake again. Doctors and mechanics are a poor analogy for your case, because the things they learn are physical and demonstrable. A mechanic is trained to know that if you put water in the oil filler, you will destroy your motor, just as a doctor knows not to prescribe aspirin to haemophiliacs.

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JBI claimed that a well-read reader with strong literary training will be able to notice (and therefore) enjoy things in literature that others might miss. These "things" are real and physical. A sprung rhythm in Hopkins, the use of Terza rima in Dante as a reflection of the Trinity - these are very real, tangible effects that can be discussed and looked at. A reader with strong literary training has something else to enjoy in Hamlet's soliloquy's than just the pathos of his speech - we can look at allusion, metre, recurring metaphor, etc. all of these being physical things.

So aside from the "utilitarian" effects - how does a doctor examining and diagnosing tuberculous differ from a literary critic examining and analyzing a spondee in a line of blank verse?

Oh. Meritocracy is applicable to the hard sciences, but not to the humanities or aesthetics. It doesn't hold up.

Have fun with this all. I stop here.

Honestly, it's quite simple. Shakespeare was learned in the rhetorical schemes and tropes of Quintillian, therefore one who wants to understand Shakespeare in depth must be somewhat familiar with them as well. I see no problem suggesting that people more familiar with something, and are used to taking things apart can tell you something more about the whole then some kid who just read Harry Potter, the first actual novel he has read, as is going crazy.

A bit of what you suggest can be found in Umberto Eco categories of readers. There is intertextual complexity.
But I would also point that poetry language is not finding the most straightfoward way to tell something - as it is journalism - so there is already an addition of textual complexity.
Also, there is Dante four levels of meaning, when the writer add complexity of significance.
Plus, there is costume. People do not write epics like Homer, we are not going to find in the best seller lists anyone trying it (or even among high level intelectuals, when it happens it is under a diguise, or something similar to Nabokov Pale fire - not exactly like homer anyways. I may be wrong but I am certain that Chesterton pun about the contents of his pockets and the age of epic poetry being long gone to be correct) to use the formula (because it is a formula). We have the best-seller formula, a plot, split in chapters, a final twist, linearity, etc, this means the public is used with a system of organization - to meet many poetic formulas or even a dramatic text - is a factor of difficulty. Even some prose workers, that end with normal chronology such as Faulkner will be harder than a sequencial plot.
Finally we have guys using a highly complicated vocabulary, such as Joyce's Finnegans and Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertoes. Anyone remotely suggesting it is a easy to read those guys as reading Agatha Christie is a genius.(Not in ironic way, a genius while cracking up codes and dealing with idioms)

Meritocracy? Elitism? It's absurd to think all texts have equal value. But it doesn't matter much that they don't. Lots of my friends (Most of them actually) do not read at all, read only religious texts or have read no significant literature since school. That takes nothing away from the superiority of "Moby Dick" to "Litle Nell's Adventures in Hollywood"

Mills and Boon novels are written solely for money, to support hacks trying to write proper books. Not all literature is like that.

Writing solely for money is not a criticism. I've built walls, built scaffolding, ploughed fields, made lobster creels etc etc solely for money and feel no shame. But then me, I'm shameless.