BOOKS
Assault on History
THE KILLING OF HISTORY. HOW A DISCIPLINE IS BEING
MURDERED BY LITERARY CRITICS AND SOCIAL THEORISTS.
By Keith Windshuttle.
Maclea. $24.95.
The title of Professor Windshuttle's book is misleading: he is not only
writing about the killing of history, but about what amounts to an assault
on all of rational thought in the best of our universities. Unlike most
American professors, this Australian historian has the courage to debunk
the literary theories that have nothing to do with literature, the new his–
toricism that abuses history, and the sociological studies that end up
finding what they set out to prove. He goes about this task by revealing the
fault lines inherent in the currently fashionable theories that are offshoots
and elaborations of French structuralism, deconstruction and posts truc–
turalism. Unlike most other critics of this enterprise, he takes on all these
trendy innovations at once, and shows how contentious notions and spec–
ulations by an academic fringe came to be extolled as superior learning.
Each of the chapters in this book delves into one or more of the major
unexamined assumptions inherent in these theoretical innovations. For
instance, he recalls that Levi-Strauss's structuralism set out to uncover the
unconscious structures of mind among the Bororo in the interior of
Brazil - by means of analyzing their oral myths along with those of
neighboring tribes. But whereas Levi-Strauss was searching for a universal
attribute shared by all of humanity, his followers construct their own
myths; and whereas he went on to generalize to the relationship of nature
to culture, they explore the differences among cultures. Therefore, many
of the practitioners of the trendy discourses forget that for Levi-Strauss
Saussure's system of language, its division into
langue
and
parole
(of mean–
ing and acoustic image), was postulated as being as applicable to social
phenomena as to spoken language; that he considered this method of
analysis as "scientific"; and that he more or less repudiated the entire
undertaking in 1968.
Derrida's poststructuralism, we are reminded, and which a few years
ago began to intrigue many professors of English, shares some of Saussure's
assumptions. But it mostly leans on Heidegger's dubious, existentialist
philosophy, and on Barthes's playful notions of literature. And by treating
"real life" as a text, it relinquishes all judgment. "There is nothing outside
the text," is one of Derrida's oft-quoted, sage pronouncements. Along
with his acolytes in philosophy and literary criticism Derrida began to
