Comment by TeMPOraL

Fair. Then I guess my argument boils down to, "I wish high-school teachers and a bunch of other people stopped doing that".

I can appreciate the argument of a work of art being like a mirror, where looking at it reveals as much about it as it does about the person looking. I can appreciate "hunt the hidden metaphor" exercises and even "bend the interpretation so hard to make the book be about something it obviously isn't" games. I've done both, and I enjoyed it - it's a nice workout for imagination and arguing skills. But I wish it was presented as such, clearly labeled as intellectual entertainment. As it is, the way I - and perhaps many other people in this thread - was exposed to literary criticism always made the critics look like historians - dispensing factual, if not always obvious, knowledge about works of literature.