Abstract

Post-modernism has achieved both academic and public notoriety. Foucault, perhaps due to the accessible nature of some of his work, his homosexuality or his early death, was summarized in the pages of Vogue magazine by Edmund White and had his last USC conference covered by Time. The New York Times Magazine recendy covered the Yale Deconstructors (only shordy before most of them left the Yale department). As the current “bad boys” of die academy, post-modernists have unified the right and the left on who they both love to hate. On the one side traditional academics, seeing it all as an intellectual “Flashdance,” call for more old-fashioned standards while, on the other side, those campus radicals left from the age of repressive tolerance want academics to finally see the light, give up their decadent ways and read more Marx.