The lecture halls, the editorships, the endowed chairs that might have been occupied 50 years ago by academics and intellectuals of a more traditional stripe are now occupied--and have been for decades--by insurgents who gained sway beginning in the 1960s and who, ever since then, have been teaching a kind of literary theory variously called post-modernist or post-structuralist or deconstructionist.

What literary theorists--post-structuralists, anyway--are teaching, might be fascinating and encouraging to people who aspire to be critics, but must be just a bit unsettling to people who would like to become authors. One of the founding documents of post-structuralism is "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes!

And I am not here to explain post-structuralism, or to argue with it, but I will say that if I were a would-be author studying literature, one hundred years ago, from professors who were willing to grand that authors actually created, understood, and controlled the meaning of their own wor, I'd feel more encouraged than I would studying it from post-structuralists.

Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I'd feel more sanguine writing certain types of fiction than others.