Woke English Departments Versus Great Literature

By George Leef

Friday, December 26, 2025

 

One of the left’s big triumphs has come in its long march through our institutions of higher education, which are now mainly engaged in propagandizing students to oppose everything in Western civilization. College English departments are especially guilty of that, as they have kicked out great books and replaced them with “woke” ones meant to bend students to “progressive” beliefs.

 

In today’s Martin Center article, Lisa Libes explains how this regrettable state of affairs has come about. She writes:

 

By the 1960s, American universities had proceeded to wage a full-scale war on all aspects of morality and tradition, making way for the postmodern literary theorists who rejected the teachings of Babbitt and put forth the following postulates instead:

 

1.      Meaning is relative if not entirely obsolete. In 1967, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida set out, in his famous De La Grammatologie (Of Grammatology), to attack the idea that a work of literature must contain an objective moral message. The book contains an extended condemnation of the tradition of “Western Metaphysics,” which, in Derrida’s eyes, privileged the good over the bad and light over darkness. In a nutshell, Derrida does away with the idea that we should gain objective meaning from literature and that literature must contain an objective moral message.

 

2.      Authorial intention is irrelevant. There have been several postmodern writings on the erasure of authorial intent, but the most famous piece comes from the French theorist Roland Barthes, in an essay called “The Death of the Author.” As its title suggests, the essay lambasts authorial intention and argues that his or her identity is entirely irrelevant to a reader’s interpretation of a given text. If an author’s intention no longer matters, then a given text belongs entirely to the reader—a death knell to the idea of the author as a moral teacher.

 

3.      “Grand narratives” are oppressive. In his book The Postmodern Condition, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard claims that one must be skeptical of “Universal Truths.” Overarching moral systems become oppressive, and any notion of “how to live well” reeks of the patriarchy, colonialism, et cetera.

 

Some of the graduates of these woke departments go into teaching, where they continue to spread their destructive ideas. And a few go into publishing, where they push books that undermine our civilization and the human spirit.

 

Libes continues,

 

In a world in which many contemporary novels mistake ambiguity for depth, it is almost heretical to insist that literature ought to mean something. But if I’ve learned anything from five years in Ivy League English departments, it is that, unfortunately, postmodernism-influenced readers will fail to truly understand literature until they acknowledge that literature is nothing without meaning.

 

You’ll want to read the whole thing.