Like many people, I went through a pretentious phase in high school where I thought that all smart people read classic literature. There was only one kind of intelligence, and it always manifested in an appreciation of the written arts.
Such an appreciation was, of course, easy to fake. Knowledge of the text could be obtained by parsing the work. Knowledge of the subtext could be either purely made up or researched on a literary criticism website. After all, literary criticism is a question where the only person who ever had the correct answer is usually dead. The only way your answer could be viewed as incorrect is if it contradicts the text (or you're talking to someone who is looking for something very, very specific, such as my 11th-grade English teacher).
I made the arts into a science back then, and now I'm watching a girl try to use lab equipment made of Play-Doh.
I love it.
P.S. Oh, and it didn't work. While I only have to look at about half of this manga's footnotes, I have about as much culture as a microchip factory. I just have leftover knowledge. Eventually, I stopped pretending to be someone else when no one was looking. Good luck, Ms. Bernard!