raritan hoax: whodunit?

[eaeg at unity.ncsu.edu]

Hi Pynchonists,

this forwarded from NASSR-L, the North American Society for the Study of 
Romanticism list.  Any ideas?  I haven't checked the Raritan index...this 
posting itself has indeterminate status for all I know.

Eyal

>In 1988, RARITAN published a high-wire send-up of postcolonial theory
>(Rothman Salazar, "Historicizing Phrenology: Wordsworth, Pynchon, and the
>Discursive Economy of the Cranial Text," RARITAN, 8 [1988]: 79-91), the
>elaborateness of which extends to a cooked-up passage of 12 lines of
>Wordsworthian blank verse that is labelled "Prelude. 1803 fragment" (as
>Wordsworth parodies go, it ain't bad; I'll append the passage at the end
>of the message).  The only subsequent reference to the hoax I've come
>across so far is the editors' comically disingenuous denial in the very
>next RARITAN number (8 [1988]:  136) that Salazar is an invention;
>otherwise, this highly-wrought joke seems to have died on the vine (unless
>I've missed something).  My question:  has anyone ever fessed up?  Joe
>Klein?  Alan Sokal?  J. H.  Reynolds VII?  A certain novelist named in the
>title?  Confessions/nominations accepted off-list, too, though I can't
>promise I won't tell.
>Here's the bogus Wordsworth text, which stands as epigraph and gets a few
>sentences of commentary late in the article:
>
>                                   And there
>     I saw a man, though scarcely yet a man;
>     His countenance, in all its surface, shrunk,
>     Or cracked, or broken, with a score of lines
>     By which his lowly work had channeled there
>     A sculpture, in the still unwary form.
>     It was to me as if his shape rose up
>     An Hierophant, one of the elder Tribes,
>     Or like an Heresiarch who strayed alone,
>     From careful foot to head all circumscribed
>     (As on a tablet fatal marks are wrought)
>     By strong enchantment of experience.
>                         Prelude, 1803 fragment
>_________________________
>Eric Walker
>English, Florida State Univ.
>ewalker at garnet.acns.fsu.edu