A good argument, but there is an elephant in the room: the scienticification of "the humanities", the replacement of arguments about books with textual analyses based on word lists and then with "deconstruction". The book clubs, the decline in English major numbers, and the hostility all owe some of their existence to the self-marginalization, the removal from what people who like to read like to talk about, that has come with chasing after the will o' the wisp of respect as "scientific". Some good work has been done in relating literature to social science (and I could go on to talk about what books are now written about), but today's work on literature as literature is for the most part just driving book-lovers away and further diminishing respect for the discipline.
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