[2133] in Humor
HUMOR: Annual Bad Writing Contest
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Mon Jul 14 13:55:24 1997
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Cc: jhimawan@alum.mit.edu, cmsmith@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 13:31:27 EDT
Well,I feel better about my thesis already... :)
-Drew
From: Connie Kleinjans <connie@nanospace.com>
Subject: HUMOR: It's more than sesquipedalian!
From: Paul Farley <PaulFarley@compuserve.com>
From: Laine Tammer, INTERNET:laine@batnet.com
>From: Baiba Strads <bstrads@library.berkeley.edu>
>From: David Kessler <dkessler@library.berkeley.edu>
>Subject: Finally! intellectual humor courtesy of Berkeley
>
>or more accurately, some fine gobbleygook culled from the academic mills,
>served up to me my dear friend Cristina M. Guardiola, a brilliant young
>grad student studying medieval manuscripts here at The Bancroft
>Library....
>
>Item Subject: Philosophy and Lit. Bad
>
>Bad Writing Contest Winners--
>
>We are pleased to announce winners of the third Bad Writing
>Contest, sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and
>Literature (published by the Johns Hopkins University Press) 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
>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 <d.dutton@fina.canterbury.ac.nz>
>Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Art
>Editor, Philosophy and Literature
>University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
>
