Popular Down the Hall, Part II

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 foundBad 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,…