Thank you for your good cheer :-). Trust me, as soon as I am finished with Huis Clos, any further attempts to get me to read Sartre (or any other French existentialist) will have to be accompanied by either a): a big hammer or b)the promise of Great Things that do not have to do with Meaninglessness.

when the class spends three weeks on Hamlet, and all but two days of that is spent on in depth in-class discussions of the various incestuous relationships, something is severely off-kilter.

That does sound a bit... unusual. We did Hamlet as part of our Leaving Cert syllabus (analogous to US high school, I think), and though incest was part of our study, I recal we focussed more on the anti-heroic aspects of Hamlet. And nihilism. Nihilism was big. :-)

Alas, literature is not something I do for fun. At least not anymore :-).