2 years in college leads me to believe that this allergy is acquired. A person can only "engage" with topics they find to be boring, pretentious, or otherwise time wasting, so many times before "once bitten, twice shy" kicks into gear.

Also, don't forget, we inflict this process on people as part of basic education in the States. Ask 100 people what they think of classics like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, and more likely than not the answers will be mostly negative.

Literary analysis is a subjective affair and turns quite a few people off, moreso when you are being graded on things like having the same opinion as the instructor. You can read something into a piece that may or may not be there, and in any case is more likely than not to be the product of your own experiences and biases, not the content of the work itself.

I think that's because the practice has many parallels with bad science. Ascribing a metaphor to the author without any evidence is pretty much an untestable, unfalsifiable hypothesis, and therefore has no value.

If you tell me that author X said that the boat is meant to be a metaphor for the protagonist's life, I will be the first to be excited and read the text looking for all the little easter eggs that the author put in, but without any evidence at all it's just your opinion.

This is also exacerbated by the lengths that people go to stretch their theory, which makes it even more obvious that they're grasping at straws in the face of evidence to the contrary.