Not really. One of the guys I have in mind wanted to be a literary intellectual. He was very enthusiatstic, had read Northrup Frye and Wayne Booth in high school, and had a huge bookshelf full of advanced literary criticism. He was a Jewish guy from Long Island, went to a top high school and did very well, with high test scores.
But he was only moderately bright, so he just didn’t have the mental horsepower to actually understand the concepts. You really needed to be brilliant to do this stuff. All of the genuine literary intellectuals made fun of him behind his back.
Jacques Barzun used to write about the decline of western civilization, and he cited intellectualism as one of the causes.
He was talking about the needless obfuscation of mostly scientific concepts that kept ‘ordinary’ people from supporting its advance. Von Braun enlisting Walt Disney to get ordinary tax payers excited about putting a man on the moon was an example of how to link very hard problem-solving to the imagination of the people who’d likely benefit the most.
When you talk about ‘literary criticism’, and having the real horsepower to do it, what exactly are we talking about, and how does you 11th grade high schooler who may want to do the same thing benefit?