Undead Texts are books once assigned on every reading list, cited in countless books and articles, endlessly discussed and debated. Although the authors of these works wore their learning lightly, the Undead Texts were intellectually ambitious and formidably erudite, drawing on a range of references that defied boundaries among disciplines, genres, epochs, and languages. Those qualities made them vulnerable to specialist rebuttals; almost every claim they made has been queried, criticized, or refuted by subsequent scholarship. No accredited academic still believes them. Yet these texts refuse to die. They have never been out of print, continue to be translated into multiple languages, and still appear on many undergraduate syllabi—sometimes assigned by the very scholars who made their reputations by challenging these works. In the current age of disciplinary definitions of scholarship, these scholarly but anti-disciplinary books have much to teach the very disciplines that scorn them.

中文翻译：

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不死文本和爱恨它们的学科

不死文本是曾经被分配在每个阅读清单上的书籍，被无数书籍和文章引用，无休止地讨论和辩论。尽管这些作品的作者对他们的学识不屑一顾，但《不死文本》在智力上雄心勃勃，而且博学多才，借鉴了一系列超越学科、流派、时代和语言界限的参考资料。这些品质使他们容易受到专家的反驳；几乎他们提出的每一个主张都被后来的学术质疑、批评或驳斥。没有认可的学者仍然相信他们。然而，这些文本拒绝消亡。它们从未绝版，继续被翻译成多种语言，并且仍然出现在许多本科生的教学大纲中——有时正是那些通过挑战这些作品而声名鹊起的学者所指定的。