During the 1980s, postmodernism quickly gained popularity in American academia, with French theorists and their disciples coming to dominate literature departments around the country. But the style of “theory” they popularized was highly self-referential and deeply obscure to outsiders. Over time, Said grew increasingly concerned about the “institutionalization and professionalization of literary studies,” complaining that his colleagues were fleeing politics to play obscure word games (or, as he put it, “retreat into a labyrinth of ‘textuality’ ”).
