From the issue dated October 24, 2003
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Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me?
For most scholars, bad academic writing, like bad academic sex, doesn't call for explanation -- or argument. It's poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It's failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A's clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In days of olde, lousy writers and lovers struggled to improve, or at least tried not to draw attention to themselves. But who can still remember a time when imperialist categories like "good" and "bad" didn't trigger counterinsurgency from subaltern stylists? The publication of Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford University Press), lets us address the more pressing pedagogical issue, and leave bad academic sex for the Human Resources Department. An anthology of essays by opponents of the Bad Academic Writing epithet (including two honored as leading darknesses of the notorious practice), this volume poses the question that could stop all "Writing Across the Disciplines" and comp classes in their tracks: When is bad writing not so bad, even if it's terrible? Culler, the well-known Cornell University literary theorist, and Lamb, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell, waste no time noticing in their introductory essay that the catalyst for recent ill will in this area, the Bad Writing awards bestowed from 1996 to 1999 by the journal Philosophy and Literature, largely targeted practitioners of "'theory,' with its odd cachet of both political radicalism and intellectual abstraction." To Culler and Lamb, "the most striking feature of the accusation of bad writing" seems plain: It appears "not to require explanation or demonstration, as if all one has to do is quote a sentence and people will instantly recognize how awful it is." The essays in Just Being Difficult?, they assert while rejecting that presumption, "are less about proving innocence than contesting the terms of the allegations, exposing to interrogation the history, conventions, and assumptions underlying the designation 'bad writing' and its almost inarguable efficacy." Denis Dutton, propagator of the Bad Writing Contest and editor of Philosophy and Literature, would doubtless dispute Culler and Lamb's claim that publishing monstrous sentences for the public, and winning public denunciation of them, does not fit the concept of demonstration. But that kind of definitional nitpicking is one reason philosophers and "philosophical" literary theorists clash so often. To be sure, Dutton, an American who teaches philosophy in New Zealand and now edits Arts & Letters Daily (an online service of The Chronicle at http://aldaily.com), did not think they required much annotation. Dutton explained his enterprise in a 1999 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece entitled "Language Crimes." He believed he could cite, for every "superb stylist" among academics, "a hundred whose writing is no better than adequate -- or just plain awful." But it took the first sentence of a book titled The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, by an English professor, no less, to send him over the edge: "This book was instigated by the Harvard Core Curriculum Report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I took to be an ominous educational reform initiative that, without naming it, would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning with the state's brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam and the consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by hitherto marginalized constituencies of American society for enfranchisement." Dutton solicited "the most egregious examples of awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose from all over the English-speaking world," quipping, "We could hardly admit parodies in a field where unintentional self-parody was so rampant." The contest drew some 70 entries a year, with winners including Homi Bhabha, a co-founder of postcolonial studies, and literary theorist Fredric Jameson. Dutton's comments could be severe. Describing reading Jameson as "like swimming through cold porridge," Dutton positioned the critic as "a man who on the evidence of his many admired books finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write well." In the course of his annual envelope-openings, the contest impresario placed the blame for grotesque academic prose precisely where Culler accuses him of placing it. Gobbledygook stemmed from the rise in literature departments of so-called "theory," which Dutton dismissed as "inept philosophy applied to literature and culture." The Bad Writing brouhaha finally exploded into a full-scale media moment from 1999 to 2000 after Dutton awarded first prize to Berkeley gender theorist and rhetoric professor Judith Butler. In that period, philosopher Martha Nussbaum attacked Butler's prose in a New Republic essay. Butler later replied in The New York Times, the Times' Arts & Ideas section descended on the spat, and the "Bad Writing Follies" claimed its 15 minutes. The publication of Just Being Difficult? returns the argument to the more textured arena of hundreds of densely printed pages, though very much on the editors' terms. Culler and Lamb don't let Dutton or Nussbaum speak for themselves, leaving them as fire hydrants to be treated by the contributors en passant -- or en pissant, as it were. (At one point, Culler calls Dutton's views "complete rubbish.") Not a single essayist departs from a seeming party line that what Dutton and his sympathizers call "bad writing" is simply "difficult" writing that intentionally varies from formulations of common sense (a commodity much insulted in these pages from a standard Adorno/Gramsci standpoint) in order to question various kinds of linguistic, philosophical, and political status quos. Despite that lack of balance, Just Being Difficult? drives home the necessary polemical point that writing and reading operate as an interactive process whose context must be understood -- if not deferred to. In their introduction, Culler and Lamb ask whether "bad" means "unclear" or rather "needlessly obscure." They ask why we condemn difficulty in academic writing but revere it in literature "as richness and intricacy." Our educational system, they complain, treats "difficulty as something to be postponed until it doesn't seem difficult." Some historically minded essayists illustrate the topic's authentic challenges. Robin Valenza, of the University of Chicago, and John Bender, of Stanford, zero in on David Hume's notion of a split between the "learned" and "conversable" worlds. Opining that Hume's adoption of a "more conversational style" seemed to leave him unable to articulate in his later, more accessible Enquiries the subtler epistemological issues of his early Treatise, they contend that specialized language can be necessary rather than willfully obscurantist. The crisp meditations of Northwestern's John McCumber on "clarity," the insights of Yale's Peter Brooks into difficulty in literary modernism, and the creative reflections of the University of Warwick's Martin Warner on fresh argot as a "placeholder" for a new public all stir thought. Other essays fail miserably, sunk by -- what else? -- bad writing. The best argument for distinguishing "difficult" and disastrous prose turns out to be just the "show and tell" Dutton liked to conduct. "Feminism's Broken English," by Duke's Robyn Wiegman -- a teeming mass of abysmal sentences, yearning to be coherent -- might be read as this year's humanities hoax if not for her track record as one of Dutton's honorees. Perhaps the saddest effort here is by Robert Kaufman, a labor activist turned Stanford assistant professor of English, who appears to be learning how to write for his peers. He mutates within his article from lucid Jekyll (on the movie Norma Rae) to hideous Frankfurt School Hyde as he delogocentricizes Baudelaire. Career transition is apparently a piece of opaque. As happened on a certain Asian peninsula, the pitched trench battles of 1999-2000 led to a demilitarized zone. Will Just Being Difficult? -- like a bullet fired at P'anmunj?omtrigger a reopening of hostilities? Will Dutton rise to the provocation of being incorrectly identified by Culler in his essay as, of all things, an Australian? Stay tuned to these pages, and other repositories of fine academic taste. According to a footnote to one essay, the title originally proposed for the volume was Worth the Agony? With the exception of the badly written pieces, the answer is yes. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches literature at Herzen University and philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, both in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 9, Page B11 |
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education