intellectuals who had come to power in French universities after 1968 were deter-
mined to set aside the traditions of the French education system, and to ‘problema-
tize’ its commonsense clarity. Heirs of Enlightenment scepticism and late Romantic
idealism, and affected by the demoralization of France during her subjection to Nazi
Germany, these thinkers were hostile to metaphysics and suspicious of the possibil-
ity of knowledge, and even of meaning in language. The competing discourses of
what was lumped together as Theory, political, psychological and philosophical, are
impossible to summarize. They are part of intellectual history, but such critical
thinking has affected contemporary culture, an effect visible in some fiction
discussed in the next chapter. For two decades, conspicuous American and some
British academic literary critics aped the way in which these Parisian conjurers had
made literature disappear: at the height of the fashion for literary theory, it was
thought very poor form to refer directly to a literary text. Critical thought was more
important than literature, as literature was a by-product of socio-economic forces.
Other theorists insisted on the provisionality and indeterminacy of language, a
tendency linked with what is often called post-modernism.nFurther reading
Bradbury, M.,The Modern British Novel(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
Corcoran, N.,English Poetry since 1940(Harlow: Longman, 1993). A full and reliable account.
Hewison, R.,Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940(London: Methuen,
1995).
Morrison, B. and Motion, A. (eds.) Contemporary British Poetry(Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1982).400 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80
Some Scottish poetsEdwin Muir (1887–1959)
‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ (C. M.
Grieve) (1892–1978)
Robert Garioch (1909–1981)
Norman MacCaig
(1910–1996)
Sorley Maclean (1911–1996)
Edwin Morgan (1920–2010)
George Mackay Brown
(1921–1996)
Iain Crichton Smith
(1928–1998)
Douglas Dunn (1942– )