Sunday's New York Times Book Review included a review by Clancy Martin of Emily Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, a book on the French postmodernists. I was interested to read Martin's personal take. He had dropped out of a graduate program in philosophy at the University of Texas, defeated by the emphasis on the postmodernists. After a few years away, having done his best to read them, he returned but found
Bad news for Clancy. You guessed it: Not even a decade later, the fashion had changed. As one of my friends at the time, now a professor at the University of Texas, told me: "It's so sad that you showed up thinking we'd all still be reading Rorty. You should've gone to the English department."
(Now I think of it, my very slight acquaintance with the postmodernists about fifty years ago came from an English class.)
It is interesting to see a confirmation, or at least reiteration, of Quine et al.'s complaint about Derrida. It is also interesting to read that Richard Rorty, who for some years seemed to be the house philosopher of The New Republic, was involved in postmodernism. Another gap in my reading.
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