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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9343619">This part seems odd to me. I went to school part time initially, so was in college for about a decade before getting my degree.When I first went post modernism was still highly fashionable in a number of departments, and I embraced it (I still remember reading people like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault and parroting what they said). Ultimately the fashion of postmodernism in departments like history and philosophy passed, and I also became convinced quite a lot of it was smoke blowing. But in history departments, the reaction eventually became rejection of it, if not outright hostility. In the field of history it is referred to as the linguistic turn. While there are some adherents to it (books from certain universities are prone to postmodernism and to a post modern style of writing), it isn't what I would call the norm. In fact, I was recently doing a project and one of the books, which I needed to use because it had a lot of very crucial translations of primary sources that were of interest, was visibly written in a post modern style, making post modernist arguments. What was interesting to me was how useless it otherwise was, and how opaque it was, in contrast to other current books I was reading on the subject. It spent an inordinate amount of its time for example in dissecting dualities and trying to render them meaningless (but in the process didn't really assert much that was helpful in improving understanding of the past). Also its rhetorical techniques really started to wear thin by the end. And the prose was horrid, filled with tons of self referential quotes. I am not saying this stuff is bad, or you can't like it, and yes I am coming at it more from the side of history than literature, but I would be surprised if what you say is true (and if it is true, then I would say it speaks more to the current state of criticism than anything else).I don't think anyone here wants to have a deep discussion on this topic. But I think it is weird if we live in a world where people not only have to accept the ideas of postmodernism, but are viewed as aberrant if they don't. If you find them meaningful, more power to you (I once thought I did as well: though I can't say I honestly understood them).Also in fairness, there are post modern historians who I like. There is one in particular who I won't name because I don't want her to be sullied by any association with an aberrant disbeliever in post modernism <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(:" title="Smile    (:"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname="(:" />)) who relied heavily on viewing things like architecture as text. I found her methods interesting because she also applied a great deal of rigor to them (something I find lacking in a lot of other post modern historians). And she had some very interesting analysis as a result. However I have not found her to be typical of historians who embrace that approach</blockquote>

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