Obviously no "English" graduates here yet from the 80s and 90s
In the rush to embrace the more outre realms of critical theory the validity so called "Canon" was pretty much demolished. This had it's positives and it's negatives. The biggest problem was that once one had, in a rough remembering of Terry Eagleton's words, "driven a coach and horses through someone else's ideas without having to have any of one's own" there was no raison d'etre behind studying "English". The radical English Faculties had lost the baby with the bathwater.

Everything was up for grabs, the author was dead and nothing was "better" than anything else. One could adopt a buffet approach to the amorphous and indefinable mass of text. History, science, philosophy, all just text and all equally valid. English departments thought everyone else was engaged in text production while, I imagine, those other departments thought "what a bunch of Cunts" (Especially about Paul De Man)

The tide has receded now. (Look at how far Jacques Derrida's star has fallen since his death*) The upshot is, however, that you can't do a hatchet job on the so called classics because English departments beat you to it a long time ago.



*Which may be a shame because I think that despite his willful obscurity he was trying to convey something. I just couldn't be bothered ploughing through Being and Time to check. The other French wankers, (with the exception of Foucault) like Deleuze, cixous, Lacan and the rest were just arseholes. Hooray for Alan Sokhal
(unclestinky, Sun 8 Jan 2012, 4:40, Reply)