To glance at the art world for a quick parallel: the critic Deborah Solomon wondered recently whether "the new-genre art favored in the 90's, the videos and installations, will ever be able to compete with the epic achievements of this century, the oil-on-canvas masterpieces done by modernists who may have mocked academic values but who made sure they knew how to draw.
In Ms. Pessl's case that means sustaining the mock-academic brio of her title throughout a long, serpentine, seemingly lightweight schoolgirl story.
The zigzagging between literature, religion, fantasy, the mock-academic and the bawdily demotic will be familiar to any reader, or failed reader, of Midnight's Children.
It is a handsome, large-format reprint of the 56 short stories as they first appeared in the Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1927, complete with Sidney Paget's original illustrations, as well as a mock-academic treasure trove, filled with copious notes giving due space and consideration to every theory or deduction dreamed up by Sherlockian obsessives to date.
According to James Najarian, Holocaust deniers working for the Institute for Historical Review are not trained in history and "put out sham scholarly articles in the mock-academic publication, the Journal of Historical Review".
Based in part on the notoriety of the mock trial, academics sympathetic to the view that Plummer was innocent, petitioned the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole to grant Plummer a pardon.
Possession includes mock versions of academic citations and titles, footnotes to scholarly editions and even extracts from imaginary critical essays.
He taught his players the kind of Dale Carnegie values that are easy to mock: hustle, discipline, academic achievement, charity, looking people in the eye, showing up on time, making the extra effort.
The translators include many such scholarly asides and detailed notes, as if themselves inadvertently recalling Nabokov's mocking novel of academic endeavor, "Pale Fire".
The bridegroom, also 27, is a manager of an academic mock-testing program at Bespoke Education, a tutoring and test preparation company in New York.
