You're creating a conflict where none exists. I said a good teacher gives students tools and inroads that allow them to connect with a literary work. Who walks into a class and directly
urges anyone to personally connect with something? No one. Except an idiot.
"We're" not supposed to do that. I guess you are. That's what literary critics are supposed to do, I suppose. Noncritics will bring more subjectivity to the read, and that's perfectly reasonable.
Literary works are not just text churned out for exegesis in service of academic careers. I work with books, but in my field they are authorial creations, and objects (physical and virtual) produced and distributed through a complicated collaborative process.
It doesn't greatly further my relationship with an author to engage in concentrated textual analysis. I may consider what tropes, images, narrative strategies and the like would be of interest to what kind of critic, and why, but for me, (often) for the author, and (usually) for readers, self-conscious epistemology is the superfluity.
In short: Most people want a story.
No one is completely detached. Treating the work as an autonomous entity is a fundamental notion in critical approaches to literature (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism). But one that is obviously complex and involves a certain level of dishonesty, in a sense.
What preceded modern critical approaches were ideas such as honoring the author's intent, and pedagogy that involved finding "the" intended, single correct way to understand a literary work, and historical approaches to reading.
Getting free of that = a good thing. But the New Critics themselves were totally steeped in knowledge of authors' lives and interests and aims, were well aware of the long-upheld "standard" interpretations of canonical works, and knew historical contexts well.
And anyhow, New Criticism isn't new anymore.
Today, most U.S. students barely know anything about authors' motivations, about history, about the history of a book's reception.
In fact most people here rarely bother to read a work of literature, so from my p.o.v., if anyone cares enough to read books, from the most refined literary productions to something as lowbrow and ridiculous as a sci-fi romance about outer-space dragon people who fuck in midair, I'm delighted.
And btw, I'm not saying literary criticism is a problem, just that most people don't give a shit about it.