Postmodernism and the ’60s

It’s not at all accidental that postmodernism takes its rise in the mid-1960s. Bloom wrote the first draft of the anxiety of influence in 1967, and revised it over several years before its initial publication in 1973. Derrida’s annus miraibilis was 1967, which saw the publication of Speech and Phenomena , Writing and Difference , and Of Grammatology . In a real sense, postmodernism, and particularly its filial revolt against the father, didn’t arise at the Sorbonne or at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes but from the barricades on the streets of Paris and of American university towns.