From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain,…
Yes; this is what university courses in literature do: they force-feed texts to students at a rate that many struggle to absorb. Instead of reading selected texts slowly and with pleasure, students rush through them with curses. It's been bewildering to me, back when I was going through a similar, though lighter, ordeal, why this was the case.