What would you say the tone and level of diction would be for this passage?

English-literature start out in little cubicles known as carrels, in the stacks of the university libraries, with nothing but a couple of metal Klampiton shelves of books to sustain them, sitting there making scholarly anologies-detecting signs of Rabelais in Sterne, signs of Ovid in Pound, signs of Dickens in Dostoevsky, signs of nineteenth-century flower symbolism in Melville, signs of Schlegelianism in Coleridge, signs of the oral-narrative use of the conjunctive in Hemingway, signs, analogies, insights-always insights!-golden desideratum!-hunched over in silence with only the far-off sound of Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks, a townie who put books back on the shelves-now she is all right, a little lower-class-puffy in the nose, you understand, but...-only the sound of her to inject some stray, sport thought into this intensely isolated regimen. In effect, the graduate-school scholar settles down at an early age, when the sap is still rising, to a life of little cubicles, little money, little journals in which his insights, if he is extremely diligent, may someday be recorded.