There is a stirring call to the spirit of literary study and teaching by a prof at Virginia by the name of Mark Edmundson. The penultimate passage is worth quoting:
“The paradise of literary study is not a lost one… Teach out of love, and the students will return. They are locked in a conformist world in which there is only one way, the standard way - the SAT, internship, recommendations way - to thrive. They need more options. They require more, and more various, visions of the good life. They don’t need to hear again what the good life isn’t. They need affirmations, coaxed from the great writers, of what it might be. Give them that, with conviction, humor, modesty, and maybe a little brio, and let us see what happens. The sun rises every day, a beautiful morning star. Why not, once at least, see if we might try rising with it?”
See https://theamericanscholar.org/teach-what-you-love/#.X2qnGy1q3mr
Norman Maclean was fond of reciting the same words, spoken by Wordsworth to Coleridge, that Edmundson invokes as his talisman for the survival of literature in a bad time: “What we love others will love.”