[peteryoung]

Mr. Bellow enjoyed the university because it was a place where he could exchange ideas with people from many different disciplines. But he said he was troubled by literature professors who over-analyzed books and set themselves up as arbiters of what is worth reading.

What confuses me is who did Mr.Bellow refer to. Were they all of the literature professors at his University, who presumably typically tend to over-analyze books, or were they the professors who did so?

And I also wonder why there's no the word 'the' before 'professors' in the original sentence. OED says one of the functions of 'the' is that it could be used to point forward to a following qualifying or defining clause or phrase, as in "the fuss that he made of her | the top of a bus". If this is true, I think perhaps the dependent clause 'who...' is describing the word 'professor' rather than limiting it. But What if we insert a 'the' between 'literature' and 'professor'? What difference would that make? And what if we inserted a comma between 'professors' and 'who'?

Thanks!!