In a brief but important interlude, we will examine the hoax Alan Sokal played on the editors of the journal Social Text with his fake postmodern science article in 1996, the resulting "media circus" and Sokal's transformation into a celebrity. Is the postmodern a game only people in the arts play? What is at stake in exempting science from postmodernism?

week 8

Meeting 1:
Jean-François Lyotard, from The Postmodern Condition (read these short excerpts carefully)
Sokal hoax documents @ http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html including

Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (browse this enough to have a sense of the main argument, how the text builds authority, how it positions itself in relation to science, humanities, and social science, and how it might give itself away as a parody/hoax in the way This Is Spinal Tap does--at least according to some members of the class)

Stanley Aronowitz, Sokal's 'Transgression'
Mara Beller, "The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?"
Bruce Robbins, "On Being Hoaxed."
Excerpts from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (1999)
(Browse the above excerpts and short responses to have a better sense of Sokal's professed intentions and some positions in the debate.)

Meeting 2:
John Guillory, excerpts from "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism." (2002) pp. 476-490 (to "familiar in the philosophy of science."), 493-508. (from "The relative incompatibility..."
Presentation by Serene & Raymond

The Postmodernism Generator

Essay 1 schedule:

Essay for peer review. 4-5 pages. Due Monday, September 16 in IVLE workbin and by e-mail to reviewer.

Peer comments. Due Thursday, September 19.

(Next week: Final draft. Due September 23 in IVLE workbin.)

Bibliographical information for print text

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1984. 23-41. 52-60.

Guillory, John. "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism." Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002) 470-508.