"..and BOY did he know about Structuralism..."
This is one of my favorite segments in the course, from Lecture 9 on Structuralism. Fry explains the arc of this brief, intense period from 1964 to 1966, the magical mid Sixties, when Structuralism washed over the United States academic scene, in literary theory, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and other fields...until it all came to a sudden, cataclysmic end.
Video starts at 7:02. Watch to 8:37
"There was an incredible aura about Structuralism in the 1960s. It crashed on the shores of the United States from France in a way that stunned, amazed, transformed people's lives. People, like Kant reading Hume, woke up from their dogmatic slumbers, or at least they felt that's what they were doing...
...it was a phenomenon that was transformative intellectually for people in the academic and beyond the academic world, all over the country, and of course it led to, in all sort of ways, most of what's been going on in theory ever since.
The amazing thing about it is that as a flourishing and undisputed French contribution to literary theory, it lasted two years, because in 1966 at a famous conference Jacques Derrida...blew it out of the water."
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