This book is well worth reading. Below are some passages that are valuable or interesting to me.

"This is not to suggest that students should be turned back to some imagined idyllic age when literature and only literature was read. By this point in time, the value of large intellectual overviews and interdisciplinary perspectives should be self-evident. What is at issue is a matter of proportion: with the finite time granted to anyone for reading, whether in or out of the university, should a person drawn to literature be encouraged to devote more attention to Lacan than to Poe, to Barthes than to Balzac? One might further question whether the best guidance is provided by this particular cluster of speculative thinkers, who as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut have shrewdly argued [footnote], represent a reductive French rhetorical radicalization of German thought . . . that may lead to an intellectual dead end." (11-12)

"What is more pertinent to the disturbing prospect of the disappearance of reading is that the language of criticism now often reflects an emotional alienation from the imaginative life of the text under discussion, [and this language] often seems in its bristling conceptuality empty of an experiential ground in reading." (15)

"Affirmative action quotas do not strike me as the most useful point of departure for a study of the language of literature." (21)

"[Even though literary values are intertwined with cultural ones,] we can identify intrinsically literary values." (28) "Fuzzy borders do not imply that a phenomenon lacks distinctive character." (29)

"This notion of a world should also make us feel unabashed about using the term 'literary work,' though contemporary practice has preferred the more renunciatory 'literary text,' which stresses the status of the writing as a weave of words. All literature is that, so the insistence on text may often be perfectly appropriate, but we are also well advised to remember that something is built out of the words (a work) which in the mind of the reader becomes a world." (41)

"the dangers of overreading are far outweighed by the dangers of underreading, a habit to which modern culture . . . predisposes us. . . . Analytic attention to the distinctive formal resources of literature is never a substitute for the immediate experience of reading . . . " (47-48)

"The very notion that literature is severed from reality because it is composed of conventions, both linguistic and literary, is an unexamined dogma of both Structuralist and post-Structuralist thought." (53)

"The whole idea of the realist work as a 'machine of repression' is a piece of ideologically radical naivete, for in the interests of displaying an impeccably liberated consciousness it entirely collapses the distinction between literature and propaganda. What is ignored is the polysemous, open-ended nature of literary texts; the evidence they abundantly offer for imaginative freedom variously exercised in the act of literary creation, often working against the grain of ruling ideologies; and hence the fundamental fact that ideology, like convention, is a context of literature but not its determinant, except when the writer slides into the propagandist." (55)

"Much about the way we perceive ourselves and the world manifestly changes as society, language, ideology, and technology change; but we also continue to share much as creatures born of woman, begotten by man, raised with siblings, endowed with certain appetites, conscious of our own mortality, confronting nature from our various locations in culture. To say that humanity continues to hold some things in common across the ages is not to imply that what is held in common is confidently known. On the contrary, the most arresting writers, even in the ancient period, often treat the human awareness of being in the world, in the family, in society, in history, as something to puzzle over endlessly. The characters and life situations of the narratives of different eras speak to us not because they reflect a knowledge which never changes but rather because they express a set of enigmas with which we continue to wrestle." (75-76)

Also the entirety of Chapter 7, the final chapter, is very much worth reading.