What studies in Literature do to your 'other' book reading

I am studying African Literature at Wits University. I do admit that the choice of books is crap. I do not like militant literature declaring revolutions as a way forward. Of course, I am sensitive to the fact that these novels arose out of a need for social justice, and perhaps mobilisation. There is sometimes no other way to express the wasteland of the soul and country that is oppressed and subjected. "Protest Literature." That is what we refer to in SA (too often). Perhaps this type of literature could have been slightly more nuanced and perceptive. Are 'revolutionaries', comrades just to their families. What were the dynamics? What power struggles existed in these intimate relationships - what oppression existed here? There is a space for these aspects of the human experience to be explored. I am a classic liberal arts student, and so I am a perfect fence-sitter, and can never provide a solid opinion (ok, maybe sometimes). And thus - there is also a strong need for un-nuanced, deliberate facts that bear an ugly sordid truth. Can the holocaust expose the weaknesses of the jews too? Wouldn't it have detracted from action? Could there have been fiction at the time? I know that historical accounts were needed, and not some higher art. There can be no way. Sometimes, ironically, words cannot suffice at all! They can only reach towards the truth - even if in a historical record. Fiction plays the role of reaching towards the ineffable. It expresses the emotions of the characters. Nevertheless something, although it resonates, is always missing. Afterall - only one person - the novelist - is rendering how THEY would have felt. But, Toni Morrison for instance, although renderig her feelings through her characters, still leaves the space open for further ambiguities and silent spaces and gaps for the reader to fill in.