From the blog Gene Expression, some graphs based on the frequency of certain keywords in the JSTOR archives. These keywords include "social construction," "psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic,""Postmodern or postmodernism," "postcolonialism," "orientalist or orientalism,""narratol*," "marxist or marxism," "hegemony,""feminist or feminism," "deconstruction." The title tells all: "Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads."

The author claims there are two slight exceptions to the overall pattern of decline--orientalism and post-colonialism, and points to the absence of "noise" in the curves. Could this be another version of the Sokol Hoax?

The inferences, certainly not unbiased, might make for an interesting conversation or two in the graduate classroom or the faculty lounge:

...aside from Marxism, which peaked in 1988, and social constructionism, which declined starting in 2002 *, the others began to fall from roughly 1993 to 1998. It is astonishing that such a narrow time frame saw the fall of fashions that varied so much in when they were founded. Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism are very old compared to deconstruction or postmodernism, yet it was as though during the 1990s an academia-wide clean-up swept away all the bull[...], no matter how long it had been festering there.