bafflegab in literary criticism



For those of you who enjoyed Richard Mitchell's Underground
Grammarian[1] and Alan Sokal's prank article[2], I present the
following from "_Sense and Sensibility_, or Growing Up
Dichotomous"[3][4] for your amusement:

"We have here four pairs of reactions, balanced against each other and
within themselves in remarkable and hilarious symmetry. We all use
contrasting pairs as a way of thinking, with parallelisms in our
sentences or poems, in the analogies of metaphor, and in the
doublings of allegory. Behind the activity we may see the outline of a
mathematical structure. The Bourbaki school have described the
mathematical method par excellence as the reduction of data to
isomorphisms; and the structuralists take this to be the model of all
human activity. An analogous principle has emerged out of Boolean
algebra into a method for machines that is a binary --or
isomorphological-- system. All data may be programmed by this system,
and one proceeds from data so obtained into new series of isomorphs
and new results. The work of Kurt Gödel sustains the principle that no
systems or results are final and complete--one moves on. I propose
that Jane Austen's series of eight reactions to their conventional
poverty situation are dealt with by isomorphs. . . ."

Written by Eliza?

[1] <http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/>

[2] "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"; see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair>

[3] From _Nineteenth-Century Fiction_ 30, no. 3 © 1975 by
the Regents of the UIniversity of California, reprinted
in _Modern Critical Views_ Jane Austen, Ed. Harold Bloom,
Chelsea House Publishers

[4] I retained the two lead sentences of the paragraph to
provide context.

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