This is essentially why I didn’t do English Lit at uni (which had been my initial thought).

Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.

In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.

I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?

I mean the fact is that it's easy to fake because the permissible space of interpretation is almost infinite. That will always be the case, and the only thing people demonstrate when they create fake analyses is that they can't be bothered engaging with the art honestly. That's fine, but it's no mark against the interpretation of art.

The real question is: who are you fooling? In a field where there's no right answer, the only person being fooled by you avoiding an honest reading is yourself. If you can make the right noises to trick someone into thinking you've considered the story, why not expose yourself to art and actually consider the story?