Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 15:41:10 -0400
Message-Id: <199706051941.PAA08435@csu-e.csuohio.edu>
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To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: Matthew Hoover <m.hoover@csu-e.csuohio.edu>
Subject: Fw: Bad writing competition (fwd)
Some sociologists are not immune from bad writing (NOT REFERING TO SOCGRADS)


--Bad Writing Contest Winners--
>> >
>> > We are pleased to announce winners of the third Bad Writing
>> > Contest, sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature
>> > and its internet discussion group, PHIL-LIT.
>> >
>> > The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most
>> > stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article
>> > published in the last few years.  Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are
>> > not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual
>> > serious academic journals or books.  In a field where unintended
>> > self-parody is so widespread, deliberate send-ups are hardly
>> > necessary.
>> >
>> > This year's winning passages include prose published by established,
>> > successful scholars, experts who have doubtless labored for years to
>> > write like this.  Obscurity, after all, can be a notable achievement.  The
>> > fame and influence of writers such as Hegel, Heidegger, or Derrida
>> > rests in part on their mysterious impenetrability.  On the other hand,
>> > as a cynic once remarked, John Stuart Mill never attained Hegel's
>> > prestige because people found out what he meant.  This is a mistake
>> > the authors of our our prize-winning passages seem determined to
>> > avoid.
>> >
>> > * The first prize goes to a sentence by the distinguished scholar
>> > Fredric Jameson, a man who on the evidence of his many admired
>> > books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write
>> > well.  Whether this is because of the deep complexity of Professor
>> > Jameson's ideas or their patent absurdity is something readers must
>> > decide for themselves.  Here, spotted for us by Dave Roden of Central
>> > Queensland University in Australia, is the very first sentence of
>> > Professor Jameson's book, Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1990,
>> > p. 1):
>> >
>> > "The visual is _essentially_ pornographic, which is to say that it has
>> > its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes
>> > becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while
>> > the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt
>> > to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless
>> > effort to discipline the viewer)."
>> >
>> > The appreciative Mr. Roden says it is "good of Jameson to let readers
>> > know so soon what they're up against."   We cannot see what the
>> > second "that" in the sentence refers to.  And imagine if that uncertain
>> > "it" were willing  to betray its object?  The reader may be baffled, but
>> > then any author who thinks visual experience is essentially
>> > pornographic suffers confusions no lessons in English composition
>> > are going to fix.
>> >
>> > * If reading Fredric Jameson is like swimming through cold porridge,
>> > there are writers who strive for incoherence of a more bombastic
>> > kind.  Here is our next winner, which was found for us by Professor
>> > Cynthia Freeland of the University of Houston.  The writer is
>> > Professor Rob Wilson:
>> >
>> > "If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist
>> > subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the
>> > sublime superstate need to be decoded as the
>> > 'now-all-but-unreadable DNA' of a fast deindustrializing Detroit,
>> > just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street
>> > control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration
>> > through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of
>> > the inner city."
>> >
>> > This colorful gem appears in a collection called The Administration of
>> > Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere,
>> > edited by Richard Burt "for the Social Text Collective" (University of
>> > Minnesota Press, 1994).  Social Text is the cultural studies journal
>> > made famous by publishing physicist Alan Sokal's jargon-ridden
>> > parody of postmodernist writing.  If this essay is Social Text's idea of
>> > scholarship, little wonder it fell for Sokal's hoax.  (And precisely what
>> > are "racially heteroglossic wilds and others"?)   Dr. Wilson is an
>> > English professor, of course.
>> >
>> > * That incomprehensibility need not be long-winded is proven by our
>> > third-place winner, sent in by Richard Collier, who teaches at Mt.
>> > Royal College in Canada. It's a sentence from Making Monstrous:
>> > Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory, by Fred Botting (Manchester
>> > University Press, 1991):
>> >
>> > "The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the
>> > dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains."
>> >
>> > * Still, prolixity is often a feature of bad writing, as demonstrated by
>> > our next winner, a passage submitted by Mindy Michels, a graduate
>> > anthropology student at the American University in Washington,
>> > D.C.  It's written by Stephen Tyler, and appears in Writing Culture,
>> > edited (it says) by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (University
>> > of California Press, 1986).  Of what he calls "post-modern
>> > ethnography," Professor Tyler says:
>> >
>> > "It thus relativizes discourse not just to form--that familiar
>> > perversion of the modernist; nor to authorial intention--that conceit
>> > of the romantics; nor to a foundational world beyond discourse--that
>> > desperate grasping for a separate reality of the mystic and scientist
>> > alike; nor even to history and ideology--those refuges of the
>> > hermeneuticist; nor even less to language--that hypostasized
>> > abstraction of the linguist; nor, ultimately, even to discourse--that
>> > Nietzschean playground of world-lost signifiers of the structuralist
>> > and grammatologist, but to all or none of these, for it is anarchic,
>> > though not for the sake of anarchy but because it refuses to become a
>> > fetishized object among objects--to be dismantled, compared,
>> > classified, and neutered in that parody of scientific scrutiny known as
>> > criticism."
>> >
>> > * A bemused Dr. Tim van Gelder of the University of Melbourne sent
>> > us the following sentence:
>> >
>> > "Since thought is seen to be 'rhizomatic' rather than 'arboreal,' the
>> > movement of differentiation and becoming is already imbued with its
>> > own positive trajectory."
>> >
>> > It's from The Continental Philosophy Reader, edited by Richard
>> > Kearney and Mara Rainwater (Routledge, 1996), part of an editors'
>> > introduction intended to help students understand a chapter.  Dr. van
>> > Gelder says, "No undergraduate student I've given this introduction
>> > to has been able to make the slightest sense of it. Neither has any
>> > faculty member."
>> >
>> > * An assistant professor of English at a U.S. university (she prefers to
>> > remain anonymous) entered this choice morsel from The Cultures of
>> > United States Imperialism,  by Donald Pease (Duke University Press,
>> > 1993):
>> >
>> > "When interpreted from within the ideal space of the myth-symbol
>> > school, Americanist masterworks legitimized hegemonic
>> > understanding of American history expressively totalized in the
>> > metanarrative that had been reconstructed out of (or more accurately
>> > read into) these masterworks."
>> >
>> > While the entrant says she enjoys the Bad Writing Contest, she's
>> > fearful her career prospects would suffer were she to be identified as
>> > hostile to the turn by English departments toward movies and soap
>> > operas.  We quite understand: these days the worst writers in
>> > universities are English professors who ignore "the canon" in order
>> > to apply tepid, vaguely Marxist gobbledygook to popular culture.
>> > Young academics who'd like a career had best go along.
>> >
>> > * But it's not just the English department where jargon and
>> > incoherence are increasingly the fashion.  Susan Katz Karp, a
>> > graduate student at Queens College in New York City, found this
>> > splendid nugget showing that forward-thinking art historians are doing
>> > their desperate best to import postmodern style into their discipline.
>> > It's from an article by Professor Anna C. Chave, writing in Art
>> > Bulletin (December 1994):
>> >
>> > "To this end, I must underline the phallicism endemic to the dialectics
>> > of penetration routinely deployed in descriptions of pictorial space
>> > and the operations of spectatorship."
>> >
>> > The next round of the Bad Writing Contest, results to be announced in
>> > 1998, is now open with a deadline of December 31, 1997.  There is an
>> > endless ocean of pretentious, turgid academic prose being added to
>> > daily, and we'll continue to celebrate it.
>> > **********************************
>> > Dr. Denis Dutton
>> > Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Art
>> > Editor, Philosophy and Literature
>> > University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
>> > Phones:  64-3-366-7001, ext. 8154
>> > d.dutton@fina.canterbury.ac.nz
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>