Archaeology of Knowledge

            Between 1975 and 1977 I attended Johnston College, a hippie school associated with the University of Redlands which at that time had its own independent accreditation.  I dropped out of school because of concerns about money and ideas about ideals, and within a year or two after that Johnston College was re-absorbed into the University as the Johnston Center, where it has thrived ever since.  I begin with the notion that the whole account of this, my purest attempt at a “liberal education,” might be structured through the books I read both inside and outside of classes while there.

            But in setting out my list, I discover that I’ve forgotten many if not most of the books I read in classes, especially the ones that would lend this exercise a certain kind of intellectual credibility.  What remains are for the most part either books that were best-sellers in 1976 and 1977, and justified in classes either by instructors or students like myself for their “relevance,” or more abstruse works that are the most obvious displays of the period’s intellectual fashion (post-structuralism rolling steadily into deconstructionism).  I find no foundational texts, nor even rigorous surveys of the fields of my interests except perhaps for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.