Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 04:45:19 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19970606064458.40d7ce74@pop.uvm.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: Re: Fw: Bad writing competition (fwd)
The 'Bad Writing Contest' is precious...
delightful...infuriating...
....but I was dismayed to find that
I understood some of the 'winners.'

                                        TR

At 03:41 PM 6/5/97 -0400, you wrote:
>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
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
TR Young
The Red Feather Institute
8085 Essex, Weidman, Mi.,
  48893  [517] 644 3089
  Email: tr@tryoung.com