lmaooooo:
One day in the autumn of 1980, during my first semester of graduate school, I was making my way to the English department when I came across a classmate. He was sitting on a bench, holding papers in his hand, and staring at nothing. When I asked him what was up, he told me that one of his professors had just returned a graded paper to him—the first paper he had written as a graduate student—and told him that he had inappropriately relied on the ideas of a literary critic named Northrop Frye. The professor had written that Frye was “yesterday’s man.” “Yesterday’s man,” my classmate repeated. “What does that even mean?”
Not so many years earlier, Frye had been the most important literary critic in the English-speaking world. But now he was increasingly being overshadowed by figures with strange names like Barthes and Derrida. A few weeks before my college graduation, a professor took me aside and whispered those names into my ear; feeling myself welcomed into some new freemasonry, I fetched an index card and wrote Bart, Derry Da. Only that initiation had prevented me from suffering a fate like that of my befuddled classmate. I tried to be sympathetic, not smug.
