The Hoax Nobody Noticed
by W.J. Elvin IIIFiled under: Literary Hoaxes
Submitted by W.J. Elvin III:
What If You Pull a Literary Hoax and Nobody Notices?
by Peter Monaghan
The Chronicle Review
August 3, 2009
Perpetrators of literary hoaxes often like to be discovered, if only for recognition of their cleverness. But for someone or someones at the literary-studies journal Modernism/Modernity, that gratification has been a while coming.
In 2004 the journal, which is the quarterly of the Modernist Studies Association, ran a review essay of the writer David Foster Wallace’s story collection Oblivion. The essay was a put-on, a leg-pull, a sham, in ways that take some explaining for nonspecialists in recent American fiction. But no one publicly called attention to the con until last month. (more…)
