Not so long ago or far away, in one of my college seminars a student—let’s call him Mike—once declared in class that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. When I asked him what he meant, Mike replied that Prince Hamlet, like a typical OCD or post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) victim, couldn’t control his fixation with finding and destroying his father’s murderer. As a result, Hamlet was responsible for the death of more than a few characters. If he’d had access to something like Prozac, a lot of collateral damage might have been avoided. Mike opined that “Hamlet” had a reputation as a great play, but as far as he was concerned it was a depressing work. Why bother reading it?

With the savvy sureness of Freud, Jung or Adler, Eric Molinsky’s cutaway offers a diagnosis of college students like Mike. The big problem boils down to what NYU Prof. Elayne Tobin calls “The Oprah Effect,” that is, “the opening of dialogue in America [and in college classrooms] about personal issues with a psychological. . .and a self-healing bent.” Along with cultural studies and its concepts of race, gender and class, today’s students have accepted the notion that misery is bad, that problems should be resolved and that literature should portray optimistic, uplifting images of happy people. Forget what novelist Michael Cunningham refers to in Molinsky’s piece as “a certain sorrow as part of the richness of human life.” Forget the notion Molinsky brings up here that “the job of art is not to correct humanity but to show us humanity in all of its extremes.”

Despite my highfalutin tone, this piece is never ponderous. It will make you and public radio listeners ponder why we read authors like Shakespeare and Melville. Plus, its musical accompaniment, especially the minimalist motifs of Phillip Glass, are pure pleasure.