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In introducing 40 essays from Lingua Franca (1990-2001), Star, who edited this now defunct low-budget general academic interest magazine from 1995 until 2001, explains what made it such a lively, influential intellectual review. LF's forte was academic controversies such as "the Sokal hoax"; here its physicist perpetrator confesses to getting his scientific parody taken seriously by a postmodern humanities journal in 1996. There are Internet rumors of LF's possible resurrection. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Lingua Franca covered the intellectual life of the 1990s--when American scholars took to the public stage as never before--with wit and passion and helped establish many of the leading voices in American journalism today.Dedicated to the proposition that academia can compete for interest with Hollywood and Washington,Lingua Franca explained, in depth, the ideas of the decade--and told some of its least likely stories. InQuick Studies a physicist humiliates the gurus of postmodernism in an astonishing hoax; the "Dirty Harry" of literary theory renounces his calling; a Romanian dissident is assassinated in a faculty lavatory; and a leading feminist faces charges of sexual harassment.Anyone concerned with the key debates of our time, and their idiosyncratic debaters, cannot afford to miss this book. It is nothing less than a collective portrait of the American intellectual in its native habits.Lingua Franca covered the intellectual life of the 1990s--when American scholars took to the public stage as never before--with wit and passion and helped establish many of the leading voices in American journalism today.Dedicated to the proposition that academia can compete for interest with Hollywood and Washington,Lingua Franca explained, in depth, the ideas of the decade--and told some of its least likely stories. InQuick Studies a physicist humiliates the gurus of postmodernism in an astonishing hoax; the "Dirty Harry" of literary theory renounces his calling; a Romanian dissident is assassinated in a faculty lavatory; and a leading feminist faces charges of sexual harassment.Anyone concerned with the key debates of our time, and their idiosyncratic debaters, cannot afford to miss this book. It is nothing less than a collective portrait of the American intellectual in its native habits.
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