Culture of Annonymity

[articulated]

So, I once had an English professor who was really into the idea of the "annonymous literary culture." He was always trying to get trenchant critical-theory treatises on the subject of annonymity in literary culture published. He pitched the idea to multitudinous publishers, gesturing expansively and scrawling illegible phrases and eliptical, seemingly non-referential arcs and patterns on the wheel-equipped blackboard that was his constant companion, and many publishers, swept away on the raging sea of his rhetoric, expressed sincere interest in his book. His one stipulation should come as no surprise -- Herr Professor wanted his book to be published without his name. Now, regardless of how excited the publisher was by the concept of literary annonymity, no publisher, anywhere, was willing to actually publish a book without an author credit. After a few hundred rejections, he began listing his author credit as "An Annonymous Author," or "Your Desire to Know the Human "Source" of this Text Betrays Your Lack of Critical Savvy," or, "The Author Function as Specified by Roland Barthes," or, when those too were rejected, in a final, uncreative fit of desperation: "John Doe." Alas. All his outspokeness on the subject had tipped off the publishing industry's non-annonymity watch dogs, and it was as if Herr Professor's target audience, the heaving masses of virginal-apropos-annonymity-in-literary-culture minds that had layn fallow, fecundly waiting to be impregnated with the seeds of literary freedom were scorched and made barren. Once again, the sperm of theory was thwarted by the contraceptive of "real life."

It's possible that the professor here-mentioned will stumble across this post on his journey for annonymity, and he might well wonder who would send up his Quixotic quest so cruely -- fortunately, he won't know, because I'm posting this annonymously. Which, I imagine, exemplifies the very brand of cowardly non-accountability that probably scared all the publishers away from the annonymous literary culture in the first place.