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I would like to respond briefly to Dorothy Stephens' defense of formal academic study. I'm in favor of it, of course, and not only because it beats the heck out of unemployment. It is intrinsically valuable. At the same time, the analogy with physics doesn't work for me. Literature is supposed to function for people in ways that cutting-edge physics is not--if I may quote from Spenser, one of its functions is "To teach the ruder shepheard how to feede his sheepe, And from the falsers fraud his folded flocke to keepe." One effect that our formal study has had is to make literature seem the property of professors, something that only professors can read and care about. Literature is not like physics (and I mean that to the detriment of neither), and I think we make a mistake when we treat as though it were.