LOL – in that case, they gave it to you!
I ran into a similar thing recently when the clerk couldn’t figure out that a 90% discount (love after-holiday sales) was just a matter of moving the decimal point left one digit.

For its failed promise of much desired insight.
For its stilted eye-glazing delivery which even passing centuries and intervening translations cannot lessen
For its being a crushing all-around disappointment despite its expansion on the Trojan War story.

I nominate: “The War at Troy: What Homer Didn’t Tell.
by Quintus of Smyrna”

“I was interested in the adventures of Aeneas, whose exploits mimicked those of Odysseus.”

So was I. Or so I thought, until I actually read some of it. Not in Latin, and not even in English.

Maybe I missed something but I found reading it [Virgil’s Aeneid- Fitzgerald’s I think] so unrewarding that I could not do more than force myself to skim through it as a kind of duty in order to have some idea of what it was like.

In contrast to the Iliad, I at least, found it difficult to cut through [or bracket] the mythological grease in order to better enjoy it: by doing a kind of parallel reading which mentally edits out and/or psychologizes the Greek gods. It doesn’t always work; as when someone, Paris for example, is plucked from certain doom on the battlefield and transported back to safety, but I could more or less manage it with the Iliad.

Aeneas the possibly historical Trojan survivor of the fall of Troy, is intriguing. At least as much as Hereward the Wake, King Arthur or other possibly semi-historical, great upheaval, survivors.

” I also thought that Latin would serve me as a building block for writing well in English.”

It probably did, as you do.

My favorite demonstrations of innumeracy came from the local Giant.

First, the college-age worker behind the deli counter who was flummoxed when I asked her to cut me 2/3ds of a pound of ham, and had to turn to the older woman working with her and shout, “how much is 2/3rds?”

Finally, the time when we wanted to buy some chicken that was on sale, and had a coupon that entitled us to a further discount.

Figuring our discount–a simple one that both my wife and myself had correctly figured out in our heads in a second or two–required first the cashier, then another additional cashier, then, finally, the manager–all three busily working their calculators to take 10 or more minutes to give us a 70% total discount instead of the 30% discount we were entitled to.

We took it.

I have no doubt that, like me, there are still plenty of students who, when they sign up for a course in “English Literature”, actually want to study English literature (even if it’s difficult and challenging), not be indoctrinated in “Transgressive Genderqueer Narratives in Colonial Literary Discourse” or what have you.

(And as a History major, I was required to take History 301 Western Civilization, which was taught by a very old-school professor emeritus who didn’t hold with any newfangled nonsense. I loved that class.)

Where you go to college has little effect on the education you receive. It makes every difference in terms of the network of people you will encounter.
* * *
Indeed.
Students in the Ivies especially are looking to become part of a “brand” that will pay off later.

Try rereading, not “close reading”; and let the text speak for itself.

If all else fails, you may have to resort to quoting.

I speak personally of, “a lack of appreciation for, or even hostility toward, the character and personality traits (perhaps judged stereotypically and unfairly) of writers.”

You assert that I, to abstract one proposition,

” was making a global statement about the arts and lit going back to Plato, …”

See? It’s not so hard to get it straight.