WARNER BROS./ALAMY When I was an undergraduate, long ago, there was a legend at my college concerning a student who was up for a summa cum laude degree in English literature and failed not only to garner that high honor but to receive an honors degree at all. According to the legend, this happened because, during his oral exams, he confessed that he had never read the multivolume novel Middlemarchby British author George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). The legend was assumed to be apocryphal, but also to indicate the English department’s conviction that if you had not read this work, then ipso facto you had not mastered this chosen field of study.