The Chronicle of Higher Education asks “What If You Pull a Literary Hoax and Nobody Notices?,” reporting on Prof. Mark Sample’s uncovering of a scholarly hoax in the journal Modernism/Modernity. I think it raises some very serious questions while also giving a bit of perspective on how well our discipline stacks up against others. (His blog, Sample Reality, is referenced but oddly not linked.)
Mark Sample, an assistant professor of contemporary American literature and new-media studies at George Mason University, blew the whistle on his blog, Sample Reality. The review essay that provoked him, “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent,” was attributed to a certain Jay Murray Siskind, in the department of popular culture at Blacksmith College. No such institution exists, nor does Siskind, other than as a rather Mephistophelean character (as Sample puts it) in the acclaimed novel White Noise, by Don DeLillo.
I don’t think this sort of thing could pass in the classics for a number of reasons. For one, as diffuse as our interests are, there’s only so much to study, and as isolated as you may feel in your particular research area, there’s bound to be someone (in Italy, probably) who is also voraciously consuming every article tangentially connected with the social implications for women of wheat production in the Levant in the latter third of the 13th century. For another, no one would accept an article from A.L Cibiades of Athens State University. I hope.
Ah, but what’s the big deal?
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English and media studies at Pomona College, put the article on the syllabus last spring for a course on Wallace (who died last year) but never had the chance to discuss it in class. She was later surprised to see some of her students cite the article as a secondary source. “My assumption was always that the piece was by one of the Modernism/Modernity editors, and was thus less a hoax than an in-joke, but the danger of the in-joke of course is how it’s received by those not on the in,” she wrote.
But the cavalier attitude of many, that this was not a hoax but some sort of playful meta-scholarship misunderstood by the humorless, is belied by the actual effect which Fitzpatrick hinted at, viz. that the confidence with which students and their professors take for granted in the scholarly merit of the journal has been compromised. By not being in on the joke, anyone who cites the article in question is made to look like a fool or worse (I can imagine situations in which this could be career-damaging).
Imagine trusting your doctor’s advice, only to learn as you pass it on in good faith that he was just having a little fun. There are contexts in which our good faith is all we have, and when it’s removed there’s little reason to maintain the relationship.
A last word from the former editors:
Rainey and Devarenne, who declined to be interviewed, seemed to suggest in their letter that the ruse revealed a lack of playfulness in some readers. After all, they asked, “who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review … well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing?”
Are we trying to be cute or to be scholars? That argument is completely meaningless unless of course you’re the sort who dismisses the meaning of words like meaning.