Books like The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice

I have previously read 3 books by Marcus, and enjoyed or at least appreciated them--Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, and a collection of his essays on Dylan. The only one I've read in the last 10 years (since I began tracking my reading here) is the collection, for which I began my review thus: "I doubt Greil Marcus is a pleasant person, and I don't often agree with him, but he is well worth reading when it comes to Bob Dylan, rock music, blues, or old-time music. He knows a huge amount, and always has an opinion." In this book he addresses something else. I guess you could say his topic here is the idea of America as it is expressed in prophetic expression. I chose to buy and read the book b/c it seemed that it would illuminate 3 speeches I find interesting--a colonial sermon by John Winthrop, Lincoln's second inaugural, and King's Dream speech. But they are mere touchstones for surveying a hodgepodge of novels, movies, songs and art. I guess I cannot blame Marcus for the fact that I was unfamiliar with much of this hodgepodge. But I wonder who the audience is that IS familiar with (even) much of it. I also don't blame Marcus for being so cultured, but he is, I would say, unwilling to write for anyone other than equally cultured cognoscenti. This fact made the book mostly impenetrable for me.But I have an additional qualm. What Marcus does with this wide range of material puzzles me. I guess I would say that his "method" is stream-of-consciousness: one thing makes him think of something else, so he moves on to that. For example, one move that he makes is to say what character from some literary work would play what character in, say, a movie. And he is quite comfortable stating connections between various works that seem to consist in little more than the fact that he says so. I guess this is known as reading one thing "in light of" another. I suppose we all do that to some extent. But the connections are generally so personal that you would never expect anyone else to appreciate them or even get them. But Marcus takes these personal links to be publishable. I don't hold it against Marcus that he thinks we should be interested in his trains of thought, but I do expect a publisher's editor to insist that there be more to a train of thought than that the author traversed it. The back cover of the book calls itself "Cultural Criticism." Perhaps that is the "methodology" of that discipline--but it strikes me as simply UNdisciplined.