Academic Fads & Fashions

Fetch Headings.ExtraData
Below are groups and resources (books, articles, websites, etc.) related to this topic. Click on an item’s title to go its resource page with author, publisher, description/abstract and other details, a link to the full text if available, as well as links to related topics in the Subject Index. You can also browse the Title, Author, Subject, Chronological, Dewey, LoC, and Format indexes, or use the Search box.
Particularly recommended items are flagged with a red logo:

Connexions Library

Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
Collini, Stefan
Book
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 den...
Academe's Poisonous Call-Out Culture
Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Article
2017
I cannot help thinking that something has gone seriously wrong when a scholar who is not transphobic or working against the interests of trans people, but, in fact, considering an important question, ...
Against Post-Modernism: A Marxist Critique
Callinocos, Alex
Book
1982
Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
Malik, Kenan
Article
1998
Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies
Hutnyk, John
Book
2004
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the so-called 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed...
The beginning of the end for identity politics?
Lopez, Daniel
Article
2017
While the millennial left’s preoccupation with identity has not disappeared, the moralistic fire has grown dimmer.
Chomsky on Post-Modernism
Chomsky, Noam
Article
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 (sometime...
Clinton Manipulates Language of Intersectionality to Preserve Support from Minority Voters
Chibber, Vivek; Kalek, Rania; Gosztola, Kevin
Article
2016
The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has been a master class in how to divorce economic issues from issues of race and gender by pushing the language of "intersectionality," which enables the ...
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
Hughes, Robert
Book
1993
Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasan...
Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism
Warraq, Ibn
Book
2008
A methodical deconstruction of Edward Said's Orientalism.
Democracy Against Capitalism
Wood, Ellen Meiksins
Book
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.
Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
Palmer, Brian
Book
1990
Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
EducationSources.ca
Website
2017
Web portal with sources of information about education and academia, including articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and imp...
Edward Said, Orientalism: Reviewed by Malcolm Kerr
Kerr, Malcolm
Article
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, lea...
Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
Leighton, Ron
Article
2017
Many today find the idea of free speech appalling—an awful fact to those who believe in freedom, quaint as it sounds. Left-liberals agitate to prevent disagreeable expression. Their masked street alli...
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean
Book
1997
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...
For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies
Irwin, Robert
Book
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 malignan...
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
Gross, Paul; Levitt, Norman
Book
1994
Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
How Does the Subaltern Speak?
Chibber, Vivek
Article
2013
Vivek Chibber argues that postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of Enlightenment universalism at its own peril. Focusing particularly on the strain of postcolonial theory known as subaltern...
How French 'Intellectuals' Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
Pluckrose, Helen
Article
2017
Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.
Humanism Betrayed: Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University
Good, Graham
Book
2001
This book offers a defence of liberal humanism as a philosophy of higher education, particularly in the humanities, against the illiberal trends, political and intellectual, that are currently dominat...
The Illusions of Postmodernism
Eagleton, Terry
Book
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 t...
Multiculturalism or World Culture?: On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Goldner, Loren
Article
1991
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 valu...
The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida
Goldner, Loren
Article
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 ...
Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
Brodribb, Somer
Book
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-Fr...
Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Goldner, Loren
Article
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) pi...
The Origins of Post-Modernity
Anderson, Perry
Book
Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016: Science and its enemies
Diemer, Ulli (ed.)
Serial Publication (Periodical)
2016
Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of t...
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 10, 2016: Back to School
Diemer, Ulli (ed.)
Article
2016
Education - about the world, and about social change in particular - is a key element in the work that Connexions does. In this issue of Other Voices, we explore a few aspects of the ways in which edu...
Postmodern Disrobed: Review of Intellectual Impostures
Dawkins, Richard
Article
1998
An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Kitching, Gavin
Article
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 curious kinds of abstract object...
Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
Rechtenwalk, Michael
Article
2013
Over the past fifty years, postmodern theory — an umbrella term generally used to refer to such diverse theoretical movements and paradigms as post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstructi...
The Professor of Parody
Nussbaum, Martha
Article
2000
It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butler’s ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
Rationality/Science
Chomsky, Noam
Article
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...
Reading Orientalism: Said and the unsaid
Varisco, Daniel Martin
Book
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 evidenc...
Edward Said's shadowy legacy: Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
Irwin, Robert
Article
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.
Telling the Truth: Socialist Register 2006
Panitch, Leo; Keys, Colin (eds.)
Book
2005
A collection of essays that examines the difficulties of illuminating the degenerative and secretive nature of public life.
The Trouble with Theory: The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
Kitching, Gavin
Book
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, ...
Vanguard of Retrogression: "Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital
Goldner, Loren
Book
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 th...
Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
Eagleton, Terry
Article
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 argue...

Sources Library

Science and its enemies
Introduction to the April 23, 2016 issue of Other Voices
Diemer, Ulli
2016
Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of t...