I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.
I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.
I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.