1. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2006
   An argument against what Collini calls the 'declinist thesis', the belief that contemporary intellectual life is getting increasingly dumbed down and stagnant. Declinists, Collini suggests, are in denial of reality and ignorant of history. Collini also skewers those who, like Edward Said, represent themselves as 'outsiders' while basking in the glamour of in-group recognition.
2. Against Post-Modernism
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1982
   Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernist leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
3. An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 1998
   Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
4. Bad Marxism
   Capitalism and Cultural Studies
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2004
   Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
5. Chomsky on Post-Modernism 
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 1995
   What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
6. Culture of Complaint
   The Fraying of America
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1993
   Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much apart of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic to Washington that we expect nothing else.
7. Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2008
   A methodical deconstruction of Edward Said's Orientalism.
   
8. Democracy Against Capitalism 
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1995
   Wood provides a brilliant explication and defense of the key theoretical concepts relevant to socialism, understood to be the most radical social and economic democracy.
   For a review, see http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2198.
9. Descent into Discourse
   The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1990
   Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
10. Edward Said, Orientalism
    Reviewed by Malcolm Kerr
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1980
    The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error.
11. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1997   Published: 1998
    The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
    Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
12. For Lust of Knowing
    The Orientalists and their enemies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2006
    A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said’s book “a work of malignant charlatanry.”
13. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1994
    Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
14. The Illusions of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1996
    Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
15. Multiculturalism or World Culture? 
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
16. The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye’s Demolition of Derrida 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1993
    A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
17. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1992
    An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
18. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
    
19. The Origins of Post-Modernity
    Resource Type: Book
    Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
20. Postmodern Disrobed
    Review of Intellectual Impostures
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1998
    Sokal and Bricmont do an admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
21. Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    A great deal of theory in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual "landscape" filled with these curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it.
    In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
22. Rationality/Science 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1995
    Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
23. Reading Orientalism
    Said and the unsaid
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    An extensive discussion of Edward Said's influential 1978 polemic 'Orientalism'. Varisco mounts a sustained critique on Said's flawed methodology, his skewed and selective handling of literary evidence, his inadequate historical knowledge, and his distorted and tendentious conclusions.
24. Edward Said's shadowy legacy 
    Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
25. The Trouble with Theory
    The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
26. Vanguard of Retrogression 
    "Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2001
    When one probes the terms of the debate, what is truly amazing is that the ostensibly anti-Eurocentric multiculturalists are, without knowing it, purveying a remarkably Eurocentric version of what the Western tradition really is. The ultimate theoretical sources of today's multiculturalism are two very white and very dead European males, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
27. Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1995
    Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.

Experts on Academic Fads & Fashions in the Sources Directory

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