Using literary theories became

 Very important at university.  There was so much infirmation on the market, educational, by the mid-1980's, we needed a filter.  Literary people have always been both sponge and filter for sifting.

  I remember it all very well looking back

  But it's difficult to explain like McLuhen's work, sometimes a weaving point, othertimes a dance--dash to the firepit, now coordinated back up.

  Keith Haring and Baudrillard.  We needed a way past nausea.  

  It was a mad dash from never-ending threat of nuclear war.  We dug deep, cats in hats, eighty-four, a kaleidoscope of randomly relevant.  Vietnam had taught us all no matter where a person is standing in relation to the hill, the broader pitcher loads and empties of detail.  People have commentary and opinion.  Instantaneous, unfiltered allowed.

  One of the hardest pre-earth day lessons to learn in coming up was the wait and gather between hypothesis and theory.

  Thesis statements can be like that too.  Not time yet.

  'Twas slow going to find French thinking about culture not titled things like Doing nuthin' but being Anti.  Anti-Marxist got hung up in the taverns of England.  A stall of ideology, stale bread, chunks of home carried in sachels and rucksacks.  Suicides (see The Golden Notebook) in literary terms had long been metaphoric in fiction.  Denoting loss to great to bear as same old self; too brokenhearted to go on; Spirit Self without body politic, without, without, without....like a freight train pounding out beat on track.

  Flower pots and fashion rags, seeds planted in tins chucked out window holes.  It was hard at college to dial down on the exact origins of the political point of reference term:. Socialism.  It wasn't a sphere on a map.

  And it wasn't supposed to be a sphere of influence, not to a flying fortress nor to a two-party system since it's birth nation.  And yet way down in the darkness and depths of communist tyranny in places like Latin America, the first steps towards something besides persecution were to pierce the ironclad isolationism.

  People can debate the finer points of word getting out--What nuking humans does to humans--but to 1950's people in a bell jar, anything "different" from decimated was Safe.  People got re-stern like pilgrims and puritans after an Indian raid.  Whole webs of social interaction had been carved into classified and caves.  One of the first interests that "counter-culture" had in the arts was archeology and the primitive because socializing and studying had been flatlined into the American Flag in black and white.

More?!?

Well, you know what they say; someone in hell needs a cup of icewater.

  I will tell you that the amount of fieldwork being applied into theory-writing was amassing fast.  So academics needed to differentiate between general knowledge and specialized.  Some theory was classified "critical" and some thinkers and theory/theiry were labeled linchpins (even when they didn't think so or want to be).