No Credentials looks at A Darwinian approach to literature: Clearing the ground:
Of course the adherents of poststructuralism and its tentacular offshoots aren't really idiots (although people like me and Daniel Flynn may peevishly call them that sometimes). Quite the contrary.Posted by Simon at October 26, 2004 10:41 AMIndeed, my fellow graduate students posed such a monumental puzzle to me exactly because so many of them were so brilliant; how was it possible that they believed this crap? It gradually became clear that they subscribed to pomo dogma the way I had subscribed to a belief in neo-pagan deities: a highly provisional, socially enforced, I'm-acting-this-way-now-because-it-suits-my-purposes kind of way, one that didn't so much require truly believing as it did being able to participate in the group discourse, and, to some extent, being willing to defend the group against outside critics.