In his 1970s campus novel *Changing Places*, David Lodge introduced readers to a literary parlor game called Humiliation. The name of this game is also its object. Players—in this case, professors of literature—attempt to outdo one another by naming a classic work they’ve never read (but assume others have), scoring a point for every person who has read it. In doing so, Humiliation inverts the rules that govern these lit scholars’ professional lives, where the goal is to have mastered the entire literary canon, or at least give that impression. Suddenly the most humiliating gap in their reading repertoire is the winning ticket. Stepping back, we can also see that Humiliation creates an ingenious double bind. Players win by losing and lose by winning. The urge to “win” collides with the fear of being thought uncultured, leaving the professors caught in a deliciously awkward double bind.…