The humanities has often been exposed to external critique due to its allegedly dubious epistemological foundations (c.f. Alan Sokal, or more recently, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian). This especially applies to literary studies, since the objects of study—and the scholars’ available conceptual tools to examine these objects—consist mostly of rhetorics. Within this field, it can never be the question of theories built on repeatable empirical experiments that remain valid until shown to be otherwise. The ontology of literary studies is a vast hermeneutic debate in which no concepts stand entirely clear of deconstruction or complete elimination. Obviously, this eradication can be achieved by the use of rhetorical force only. Moreover, the telos of the activity of literary studies is rather obscure. However, at the centre of all there must be acts of reading in some or other form. In our contemporary world of digitalisation, acceleration, multi-tasking and lack of deep attention (Hayles), the practice of reading literary works—especially longer pieces—becomes automatically problematised from within the emerging culture. Why put in such an effort when narratives can be consumed faster through other media with considerably less exertion of energy (and waste of time)? The central argument of this paper is that it is useless to try to come up with rational and empirically resilient support for the importance of reading literature, either inside or outside educational contexts. There is no use in trying to argue that the brain can be shown to be positively stimulated in empirically confirmed ways. If choosing that path, we would already be in the disenchanted world of the natural sciences—a realm meticulously scrutinised in the works of Michel Houllebecq and Tom McCarthy. The arguments for the reading of literature can only be forwarded rhetorically and metaphysically and it is futile to lament this state of affairs.