ABSTRACT
As a critical parody of learned discourse, Schmitt’s The Buribunks is part of a set of traditions extending back to antiquity and forward to the twenty-first century. This chapter examines The Buribunks in the context of these traditions. It analyses how Schmitt’s essay signals its identity as an anti-intellectual parody and reviews two of the traditions to which it belongs: the Menippean satire and the hoax. It also reflects on the significance of these forms in the twenty-first century. The borrowing of formal features of scholarly discourse and the double-voiced address exemplified by The Buribunks became ingredients of certain branches of legal discourse in the late twentieth-century United States, and some similar techniques also characterise contemporary popular and social media. Understanding the readerly phenomenology of this mode of address might help those concerned with efforts to rehabilitate contemporary public discourse about scholarly traditions of communication.
