I agree with your comment about Foucault. I was an undergraduate English major when he hit academia like the Beatles hit America on the Ed Sullivan Show. Every single bored professor tired of reading like a normal human being latched onto this Frog, treating him like the second coming of Socrates. He fit their notions of what it takes to be trendily naughty ("transgressive" as they like to say) and dazzled them with grandiose pronouncements on everything and puzzling arguments with theses like "language is a tool manipulated to exercise power" reinforcing the already prevalent nihilism among godless academics and boring the living shit out of students who just wanted to read Shakespeare and the Romantics and arrive at their own conclusions about language and art without any untranslatable French philosophical bullshit weighing them down.