Bad writing prospers in the humanities and social sciences, so we are spoilt for examples. In one famous case, Martha Nussbaum rounded on Judith Butler for her obscurity, arguing it was an insidious form of stylistic collaboration with the power structures targeted by her writings. Nussbaum’s review, ‘The Professor of Parody,’ raised the profile of a sentence already legendary as a result of Bu...

The aim of this article is to assess the role of postmodern parody in the deconstruction and the reconfiguration of the literary canon. The canon is a concept and a heuristic metaphor which in Romania has started being discussed in a systematic manner only after 1989. The Romanian version of postmodernism is undoubtedly indebted to the Western model, but its promoters (writers of the ’80s, main...