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At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.
Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:
I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes
This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.
Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.
The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.
Chapman is a fucking moron, and not rationalist curious but deeply embedded in rationalism. “Post-rationalism”, when it was new, was nothing more than a way of being into (at the shallow end) Deeprak Chopra type shit for personal growth on “rational” grounds (“if it works it isn’t stupid” or whatever) without getting kicked out of the clubhouse. It’s harder to see those outlines now because mainline rationalists have effectively adopted that plus far more extreme attitudes in their day to day over the last 5+ years, so post-rationalism looks harder to understand and more interesting than it really is or was.
Chapman himself was trying to do rationalist existentialism (hence his title, “Meaningness”, the quality of being meaningful, with particular respect to “having meaning in one’s life”).
Of course he was naive, but he’s also just writing yet another completely oblivious ass-pulled blog pretending to do meaningful sociology with just whatever shit came off the top of his dome. It’s identical to everything else written in this regard within 15 miles of LessWrong and should therefore be ignored except insofar as its laughed out of the room.