Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983). Scholars rarely write books like these anymore: ambitious, erudite works that boldly set forth big, original ideas but were written as much for other scholars as for a broad public.
These are the Undead Texts. Their ambition and success inevitably made these works targets of specialist rebuttals. There is probably not a single claim they make that subsequent scholarship has not queried, criticized, or refuted. Yet these texts refuse to die. Novices and experts alike remain susceptible to the spell they cast.
Though these zombies are too miscellaneous in subject matter and style to constitute a proper genre, they are a recognizable type. When we asked a dozen scholars, in classics, history, anthropology, literary studies, sociology, and philosophy, to participate in a conference dedicated to Undead Texts, no one had difficulty coming up with an example; indeed, most had numerous candidates. Nor did other colleagues, who reeled off their own titles: Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1949), Frances Yates's The Art of Memory (1966), Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures(1973).
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