从拒绝Jane Austen到Sokal事件

[匿名者]

< Using the pseudonym 'Alison Laydee' – a play on Austen's original nom de plume "A Lady" – Lassman sent out the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion to several major publishers and literary agents, with different titles but only minor changes to the text, such as character names and locations. The resultant article discussed how all but one of the publishers and agents failed to recognise her works, including Penguin Books and J. K. Rowling's publisher Bloomsbury, with the vast majority rejecting the attempt to gain a publishing deal. This was also despite Pride and Prejudice's opening line "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" was left intact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejecting_Jane

< In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

< "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the "morphogenetic field" could be a valid theory of quantum gravity. (A morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea.") Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

审稿的编辑们素质低下，漏洞百出。前者是“本行不了解”，任何一个英文系本科学生不可能不读Jane Austen；后者是“外行充内行”，明明物理学的名词一个都看不懂，还敢大胆放行，其实只要随便refer一个大学物理系老师就能拆穿的事情。综上，出版界都是些什么牛鬼蛇神。