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Editor R. R. Reno is joined by Mark Bauerlein to talk about his article from the March print edition, “Purveyors of Truth” They discuss the origins of theory in post-war Germany, the exhilaration of being a young scholar during theory’s heyday, and the unfortunate decline in the humanities as theory has been co-opted by diversity bureaucrats.
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Perhaps in part because I am close to a generation older than R.R. Reno and Mark Bauerlein, I somehow escaped falling under the spell of Derrida and Foucault…Being multilingual, I read Heidegger in German and Sartre in French back in the 1960s and though, for a time enthralled (or simply yearning to be “with it”), I concluded that it was all malarkey: “Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie/Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum,” says Goethe’s Mephistopheles…That feeling was reinforced, perhaps unfairly, when I spent two years as a visiting professor at an American liberal arts college, where those teaching European languages and literature were more steeped in theory than in the general culture. I remember sitting in on a class in which a novel by André Gide was being discussed. The young instructor was a fine chap, but while he knew all about Derrida and Foucault, he couldn’t answer several students’ questions, because he had no idea of Gide’s Biblical references…Though a linguist by training, I now putter about primarily with Classical Japanese literature, whose study has (so far) not been ruined by the ideologues, though some are giving it the old try…