Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Create your own postmodern essay

Some of us have been subjected to the unpleasant necessity of having to read modern academic works of a, shall we say, less than ideal level of lucidity. In fact, this has become the hallmark of the intellectually cloistered postmodernist academic world: a lack of clarity.

Well, someone has come up with the ideal way you can producing a great postmodern essay of your own. It is called the "Postmodernism Generator," and is available at Communications from Elsewhere. Here is the methodology followed by the generator:
The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).
I have just tried it, and produced the following specimen of modern postmodernist academic prose:
The main theme of Bailey’s[2] critique of textual capitalism is not, in fact, deconstruction, but subdeconstruction. Thus, if capitalist socialism holds, we have to choose between the neocultural paradigm of expression and Sartreist absurdity. Lacan uses the term ‘the neostructural paradigm of reality’ to denote the paradigm, and hence the stasis, of semiotic class.
I'm thinking of submitting it to an academic journal, just for fun, on the outside chance I might be able to have my own Alan Sokal moment.

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