Post-Structuralism as Post-Adolescence

Conservatives probably shouldn’t have a favorite Marxist literary critic, but Terry Eagleton is mine. (True, he’s also the only Marxist literary critic I’ve ever read but I suspect that even if I read others he’d retain the title.) Reading his Literary Theory convinced me that “theory” may not just be trendy pseudo-academic nonsense—at least not completely.

Anyway, I’m a fan of Eagleton quotes and Peter Leithart found one worth passing along in the Terry Lectures (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series)): “[Existentialism] was for the most part an ontologically imposing way of saying that one was nineteen, far from home, feeling rather blue, and like a toddler in a play school hadn’t much of a clue as to what was going on. A few decades later this condition persisted among late adolescents, but it was now known as post-structuralism.”