About #2: It's impossible that it's nonsense. To be nonsense, it would require a conspiracy among the field's thousands of practitioners and most of their students and admirers. The alternative is that the practitioners - the content creators - are the conspirators and the consumers are dupes, but the odds are against maintaining a long-running scam on such otherwise smart people (I hope).

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.