Why am I reading this?

I thought I would share a sample of the "great works" I have been reading for my class about English literature. If you can't appreciate this, then you must not have had a good education or else you can't appreciate good literature/art you are completely normal and have not gone insane like the people that wrote it. (I did those strike-throughs with html code all by myself--aren't you impressed?)

This is from the first paragraph of "Proteus" from Ulysses by James Joyce. I had a hard time deciding which part to share because it's all so, um, amazing.

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see."

I have three more class sessions left before this semester is over and Christmas break begins (while people at BYU will probably continue until December 23rd). I did enjoy this class--I had a really good teacher and enjoyed attending the classes and gaining insights about the works we were reading. But now that the semester is coming to a close, I'm afraid I'm leaving with the feeling that I read a lot of books this semester, but most of them don't have a lot of intrinsic value, even though they are supposed to be the greatest works of English literature. I learned that Dickens, Austen, and the Brontes are actually not considered to be as great as the works in my Norton Anthology--some of the things we read were good, while others were garbage in my estimation (think The Importance of Being Earnest and James Joyce). I really think Charles Dickens was a great author--all of his books that I have read have given me things to think about that are of real value. He was trying to say something useful about life to his readers. Contrast that with The Importance of Being Earnest, which is about a bunch of silly, substanceless people who never say anything important or of any real value. Like I said, I enjoyed this class, but I've come to the realization that my definition of great literature is even more different than I thought from the definition that most people have. I'm looking forward to the Christmas break, when I can have some time to read some books that I've been wanting to read.