ABSTRACT
I begin writing this essay in the best and worst of times. I survived postmodernism without wounds. I even managed to get by undiscovered with nightly poetic raids on academia for twenty odd years. Loosely disguised in the secrets of the wee small hours; clad in a language where use of metaphor is neither more nor less threatening than freedom of speech. My discipline being literary studies, these iterated outbursts of poetry or pure fiction in the middle or margins of academic texts seemed for a long time to be considered a somewhat odd but not directly degrading habit. Thus, having successfully become associate professor (without being busted for the un-academic contraband enfolded in my CV) I just might have convinced myself it was all OK. That I could just go on and ‘not awaken a bear that sleeps’, as the Swedish saying goes. In other words: play it safe. Make no fuss about it, but just go on doing it, avoiding the disturbance of conflicts and open confrontations with the guardians of conventional style, wherever they might lurk—on editorial boards, in publishing houses or in the office of your next-door academic neighbor.
