But hardware requires software, and universities require a curriculum. Just as once before in “Western Civilization,” the Irish monks miniaturized Graeco-Roman civilization in the form of a curriculum for medieval European civilization, so now the Hutchins and the Conants miniaturized Western European Civilization to make it into a curriculum for American post-industrial civilization. The same thing happened in the Sui and Tang dynasties in China, when the Confucian classics were turned into a cognitive foundation for the imperial unification of China.

George Steiner was blessed to be at the University of Chicago in the greatness of its kairos; mine was a different karma, and I was in California at the time when a completely post-European American culture was emerging, and it sent me scurrying for cover in safe havens like Pomona College and Cornell. At Cornell, I sat around the table of Robert Martin Adams’s seminar on James Joyce with Gayatri Spivak. She chose to follow the lead of Paul De Man, who was also at Cornell then, into the deconstruction of Yeats; I chose to go to Ireland in a mythic quest for the symbolic meaning of the construction of Yeats’s tower – a construction that allowed him to pace upon the battlements and stare at the breathless, starlit air. De Man had erased his own traces of the fascist and anti-Semitic articles he had written in Belgium before the war, and was then using decentring and deconstruction as ways of covering his own lack of values and an inner center. I went to one of his lectures, read his reading of Yeats’s “Among School Children,” and was revolted. In my revolt, I published my own reading of that poem,⁷ and decided I would go to Ireland and take Yeats at his word.

When I returned from Ireland to take my first teaching position at MIT, L.A. went up in flames in the Watts riot, and the Vietnam war escalated to the point that the faculty became split between the Hawks, with Ithiel da Sola Pool in Political Science, and the Doves with Noam Chomsky in Linguistics. My department was taken over by a cabal of Maoists who wished to eliminate the canon and replace Wordsworth with Eldrige Cleaver. I quit MIT and came here to York in 1968. That year was the year of Paris, when Foucault’s star was on the rise; it soon became a sun that blanked out all the other constellations of thought in literature departments in North America.