wherefor literary analysis?

The next subject I'll be dealing with on this blog is literary analysis. A great many resources exist on how to go about it--resources like every English major program in existence and the entirety of literary theory--but if you're wondering why literary analysis and its ilk deserve to exist at all, you're going to be pretty hard pressed to find a real, substantial answer.

It irritates me to no end when scholarly-type stuff simply assumes that its raison d'etre is so patently obvious that it needs no explanation--which leads to a lovely situation in which anyone who doesn't understand why it exists is worried that he or she will be branded an idiot if they do ask, so nobody does. I guess you could say I'm a big fan of something Irving Langmuir once said: "Any person who can't explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan."

If there's something in particular you'd like to ask or have explained regarding lit analysis (or anything else, for that matter), go ahead and ask. The teacher in me loves to have a good question to answer.