In May 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in the fashionable academic journal Social Text. The essay quoted hip theorists like Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze. The prose was thick with the jargon of poststructuralism. And the point the essay tried to make was counterintuitive: gravity, Sokal argued, was a fiction that society had agreed upon, and science needed to be liberated from its ideological blinders.

When Sokal revealed in the pages of Lingua Franca that he had written the article as a parody, the story hit the front page of the New York Times. It set off a national debate still raging today: Are scholars in the humanities trapped in a jargon-ridden Wonderland? Are scientists deluded in thinking their work is objective? Are literature professors suffering from science envy? Was Sokal's joke funny? Was the Enlightenment such a bad thing after all? And isn't it a little bit true that the meaning of gravity is contingent upon your cultural perspective?

Collected here for the first time are Sokal's original essay on "quantum gravity," his essay revealing the hoax, the newspaper articles that broke the story, and the angry op-eds, letters, and e-mail exchanges sparked by the hoax from intellectuals across the country, including Stanley Fish, George F. Will, Michael Bérubé, and Katha Pollitt. Also included are extended essays in which a wide range of scholars ponder the long-term lessons of the hoax.

"Hoaxes are fun to read about, especially those that harm no one. It's a bonus if they embarrass pompous institutions whose opinions we dislike. The Sokal hoax seems to have these qualities. . . . Upset at what he [physicist Alan Sokal] considered absurd relativism, Sokal composed a long essay written in turgid academic prose, full of politically correct nonsense backed by pages of quotes from heroes of postmodernism—and the trendy journal Social Text found it valuable enough to publish. The editors of Lingua Franca, which first revealed the hoax, here reprint Sokal's essays and assemble the responses. There are sections devoted to the popular press, academic press, and foreign contributions, and, as with all good intellectual controversies, the issues are more complicated than they seem at first. Although plenty of wacky multicultural and feminist academics exist, most of Sokal's targets take less extreme positions and complain that he caricatures them. Worse, the glee with which the popular media took up the controversy reveals an unpleasant anti-intellectual side of American culture. Readers who struggle through Sokal's essay will be relieved to find the rest of the book lucid, readable, and positively stimulating."—Kirkus Reviews

"This anthology contains Sokal's original paper as well as its multifaceted responses. More importantly, it is valuable as a historical document of an academic tempest, the result of Sokal's daring experiment on views that most hard-nosed scientists (especially physicists) have always entertained on what is seen as naïve pronouncements of some postmodernists on the nature and significance of scientific truths. . . . Highly recommended. All levels."—Choice

"Heavily peppered with post-structuralist jargon . . . [t]his fascinating collection of documents includes the original essay as well as the newspaper articles that propelled the story into the public domain."—London Review of Books

"The Lingua Franca editors' selections amplify two main points of difference. The first chasm lies between the epistemologies of the sciences and the postmodern humanities. . . . The second gap is between US cultural-studies academics and the political Left. . . . For those interested in science studies (however defined), epistemology and the obvious plight of much cultural theory, The Sokal Hoax belongs beside Sokal's Intellectual Impostures (with Jean Bricmont, 1997) and Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994)."—James Dixon, Canberra Times