Suddenly I started describing anything that was taken apart as being “deconstructed.” Anything weird was merely “postmodern.” Maybe, in fact, there was no truth. The word itself was meaningless. How did we come to agree on the meanings of words to begin with? Talking about all of this was fun. Multiculturalism, and the inclusion of women and minorities in the canon, still felt like a meaningful intervention. But what if your issue was with the very notion of standards and hierarchies? Critics of Derridean deconstruction worried where these questions might take us. We could seek nuance and
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