One thing that I always find extremely shocking in literary criticism is that people who are professional readers look at a text and remain utterly unable to read it. This happens because their expectation of what the text should be saying functions like an impenetrable wall. They end up never actually engaging with the book they’re reading because they are in dialogue with their own fantasy of what the book should say.
The biggest secret to publishing a lot as a scholar of literature is simply not to do this. Approach the text you are analyzing as is. Put away your confirmation bias and your need to know everything in advance. They are children of anxiety, and it makes no sense to let anxiety guide your reading.
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