Central to the undermining of the Western canon was the relativism of figures like literary theorist Stanley Fish, who undermined the idea of the stable meaning of texts and of a literary canon having objective timeless value: ‘The only way we can hope to interpret a literary work is by knowing the vantage point from which we perform the act of interpretation.’ Filled with like-minded academics, Duke University’s English department became known as ‘the Fish tank’, that also promoted French theory in which universal claims about truth were represented as serving the interests of the powerful.
