To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

I've been reading Professing Literature, by Gerald Graff, and he makes a decent case for the necessity of New Crit. at its historical period (1930s-1960s) in the American university system. At the time, it seems like it was necessary to focus on the text for a while, because the other options were pretty much philology or history, to the point where people were looking at Shakespeare in order to study the evolution of the English language and nothing else. And I think it can be useful for beginning English majors--if you don't know the context for something yet, you can at least look at the text and make arguable interpretations based on the evidence in front of your face. But at a certain point, you have to acknowledge that not every meaning in the text can be grasped through the words alone, no matter how rich they are.