The Great Awokening was given a test drive in university English Departments in the late 1980s where, under the influence of Continental theorists like Foucault, it was considered fashionable to decolonize the Canon and throw out the Dead White Males. At the time, the Canon Wars received considerable coverage in the higher brow popular press, such as the New York Times Magazine.

My suspicion was that much of that was English department academics trying to erect severe barriers to entry. Tenure track English professors are particularly in danger of competition from adjuncts who love great literature for being great literature: empty nest housewives, retired advertising copywriters, and the like. So by emphasizing the requirement for Literature Professors to be conversant in an ugly, graceless vocabulary of “theory,” you can drive away many people who would love to teach students about the most beautiful writing of history.

In retrospect, we can see that these c. 1990 Canon Wars were an important step in the Woke’s Long March Through the Institutions. But in the prestige press at the time, the Woke mostly lost, in part because the Great Writers of the Past really are great. For example, the theater kids on campuses continued to find Shakespeare a joy for their Let’s Put on a Show urges.

A titanic voice on the side of the Dead White Males in the late 20th Century was the most imposing literature professor of the time, Yale’s Harold Bloom. From the New York Times: