Both these fabrications, of Araki Yasusada, a Japanese poet who survived Hiroshima, and Jiri Kajane, an Albanian short-story writer from the immediate post-communist era, are of an unusual kind. In some respects they resemble the ‘entrapment hoaxes’, in Brian McHale's phrase, of Ern Malley and Alan Sokal, since the texts signal, if in muted fashion, their own deceptive status, and both depend on the knowledge of that deception for full effect. Yet there are definitional differences between the present cases and those of Malley and Sokal. Any definitive revelation of authorial identity has been withheld in relation to Yasusada even in the wake of the fraud's exposure; while Kajane's stories have responded to their own publication history in becoming increasingly self-conscious about their deceptive status. Thus both cases have transformed themselves from examples of entrapment, a kind of hoax whose delayed exposure is meant for ‘didactic’ ends, into aesthetically motivated ‘mock hoaxes’ that signal their own inauthenticity. The very fact of such a transformation is what makes these examples into ‘stunts’ rather than hoaxes, and demonstrates the difficulties of classification using intention-based categories. Describing these hoaxes as stunts suggests that knowledge of their particular kind of inauthenticity emerges during the course of reading, to be shared by publisher, reader and critic alike, and that this forms the background for enjoyment of the text itself.

While the poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart made clear their responsibility for the creation of Malley and the fact that they considered his poetry to be a collection of ‘nonsensical sentences’, Sokal's article did not necessitate a change of identity – it was published under his own name – except in the sense that his argument, which he likewise later described as an example of ‘fashionable nonsense’, implied a writer with an allegiance to a particular theoretical system. The hoaxes in Yasusada's and Kajane's cases are not meant to expose the intellectual imposture of those who accept meretricious writing at face value, but the opposite: they serve to imply that writing of merit may not be acceptable unless its author has the right kind of biography, even though both may consist of fictive texts.