Literary Criticism Should Not Require Diagrams

So now that we're nearly done with the semester and about to start writing our final papers, my Russian professor assigned us a chapter from one of his own books, an analysis of late Soviet-era literary trends. I'm rather disturbed that I'm going to have to write ten pages for a guy who favors sentences like: "But literature moves on and, following some unknown law, once again makes the transition from a moral stage to a religious one, constructing a vertical metaphysical line over the single point of the moral individual."