Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804747105 ISBN 13: 9780804747103

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2003

Riassunto

Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them.

In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Jonathan Culler is Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Kevin Lamb is a graduate student in the English Department at Cornell University.

Dalla quarta di copertina

Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them.
In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them.
In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.

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Just Being Difficult?

Academic Writing in the Public Arena

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4710-3

Contents

Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB............................................................1Part 1. In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates and the History of Philosophy1. Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars: A Historical Perspective MARGARET FERGUSON.......................................152. Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER.............................................................293. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy JONATHAN CULLER.................................................................................434. The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning JOHN MCCUMBER.............................................................58Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor5. Feminism's Broken English ROBYN WIEGMAN.........................................................................................756. The Resistance of Theory; or, The Worth of Agony REY CHOW.......................................................................957. Styles of Intellectual Publics MICHAEL WARNER...................................................................................106Part 3. Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness8. On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity PETER BROOKS...........................................................1299. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics ROBERT KAUFMAN.......................................................................13910. Bad Writing BARBARA JOHNSON....................................................................................................157Part 4. Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment11. The Morality of Form; or, What's "Bad" about "Bad Writing"? DAVID PALUMBO-LIU..................................................17112. The Politics of the Production of Knowledge: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak STUART J. MURRAY.....................18113. Values of Difficulty JUDITH BUTLER.............................................................................................199Contributors........................................................................................................................217Index...............................................................................................................................221

Chapter One

MARGARET FERGUSON

Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars

A Historical Perspective

Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight of hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipulative methods showed only disrespect. -Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody" The Sophists were disliked for different reasons both by philosophers like Socrates and Plato and by leading citizens. The odium which they incurred in the eyes of the establishment was not only due to the subjects they professed; their own status [as "foreigners" to Athens] was against them. -W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists

PHILOSOPHERS, Martha Nussbaum suggests, demonstrate their moral goodness by using good language. Good language is clear language; it avoids any "obscurantist sleight of hand" and conducts its arguments without any trace of those "manipulative methods" that Plato's Socrates associated with the Sophists. That group of language users and teachers, whose name allies them with sophia, wisdom, have nonetheless come, in Western history, to be vilified as false claimants to philosophy's goods. Those who possess some cultural literacy of the kind defined by E.D. Hirsch know that a sophistical argument is a specious one; and those who read and allowed themselves to be persuaded by Nussbaum's denunciation of Judith Butler's writing style (and ideas) in a 1999 issue of the New Republic know that those associated with Sophists, even at the turn of the millennium in a country far from Greece, are rhetoricians who seek to manipulate their readers' minds rather than respecting their souls. When they assessed Nussbaum's highly manipulative rhetorical gesture of associating Judith Butler with the Sophists, however, did the readers of the New Republic know that the Sophists were foreigners, "provincials" (in the eyes of Athenians) who lacked legal standing in Athens and whose habit, as Plato describes it, was to wander "from city to city ... having no settled home of their own" (Timaeus, 19e)?

The Sophists' status as foreigners is less likely to figure in a Hirschean conception of modern American cultural literacy, I suspect, than is their reputation as amoral, or even immoral, rhetoricians. In truth (but beware such a phrase: it may be attempting to manipulate you), the question of what constitutes foreignness in language use and among language users is intricately bound up with debates (past and present) about what constitutes "good" writing (or speaking) in English. By English I mean, in the context of this essay and this volume, that standardized form of the language that some sociolinguists call a "high prestige dialect" and see emerging, as a concept and a set of prescribed practices, over the course of many centuries starting in the early Renaissance era. What counts as "bad" English has often been defined as a function of what the Athenians called barbarism or, more precisely, solecism. This term, which I vividly remember first seeing in the margin of one of my graduate school essays, where it accompanied a circled phrase the professorial reader regarded as extremely infelicitous and as a mark of my gross ignorance, denotes, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "speaking incorrectly," a "violation of the rules of grammar or syntax." Ancient writers used the word to refer to "the corruption of the Attic dialect among the Athenian colonists at Soloi in Cilicia." Solecisms are thus usages judged to be improper or (later) "nonstandard" by those who know the rules of the prestige dialect, which is often, historically, the dialect spoken at the court and/or in the dominant city of a region or (later) of a nation-state.

By looking at a few moments in the history of the concept of a standard language or, as Dante called it, an "illustrious" vernacular, I hope in this essay to question a tendency I see not only in Martha Nussbaum's approach to the problem of Butler's "difficult" style but also in that of many well-educated persons who have written more generally, and in various fora, against the "obscure" language, often called "jargon," of recent literary and cultural theory. The tendency against which I'm writing here-and which I've certainly exhibited myself, at moments of irritation when I've felt that life is just too short to wade through one more convoluted sentence by (for instance) Luce Irigaray, or Jacques Derrida, or Theodor Adorno, or Cicero, or Milton-is to project one's irritation with stylistic difficulty as a negative moral judgment on the author of the text in question. It may of course be the case that the author is or was a liar or a criminal; but the difficulty of his or her style is, I contend, much less likely to reflect a given author's moral qualities than to refract a complex set of interactions between the features of a text (its grammar, its lexicon, its habits of allusion, but also, perhaps, the size of its print and the quality of its paper), on the one hand, and, on the other, variously educated and socially positioned readers whose tolerance for certain kinds of unfamiliarity may vary not only according to their education and social class but also according to their health and mood on a given day. My general aim, then, is to disaggregate the problem of stylistic difficulty, to separate some of its components so that it becomes less easy to recognize and judge than it seems to be in Nussbaum's construction of the phenomenon. I'm particularly interested here in opening a historical perspective onto the reasons why different readers may have different degrees of tolerance for aspects of a text's language that seem alien, foreign, unknown, or, at the least, hard to know without some considerable expenditure of time and energy.

Consider Nussbaum's statement that during a long plane trip she found Butler's prose "fatiguing" (40). Turning from Butler's writing to a student dissertation about "Hume's views of personal identity," however, Nussbaum found her spirits "reviving." "Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride." It's not the expression of a preference in reading matter to which I object, nor is it Nussbaum's rhetorical gesture of recounting a personal experience to illustrate her argument: the Sophists, as well as Aristotle, recommended that rhetoricians enhance their authority by demonstrating aspects of their "ethos" or "good character." do object, however, to Nussbaum's implied judgment that both Hume and the student writing "clear" prose about Hume's theories of personal identity are morally superior to Butler because their writing styles (presumably quite different) are less fatiguing (to Nussbaum) than Butler's is: "what a fine, what a gracious spirit" is Hume's; "how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty," Nussbaum exclaims (40). Butler, however, is not "kindly" toward the reader; her style is "ponderous and obscure ... dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions," half of them (in the list Nussbaum gives) from non-Anglophone countries. Hume is praised for exposing his "uncertainties" to us, but Butler is chided for using too many questions and for failing to tell us "whether she approves of the view described." Hume's way of expressing uncertainty seems to be good because it is somehow in a Platonic tradition of "equals trading arguments," whereas Butler's way of (perhaps) expressing uncertainty seems to be bad because it is alleged to be in a sophistical tradition of manipulating the reader. I suspect that matters are more complex than this, and Hume might well have agreed, on the evidence of an essay Nussbaum doesn't mention, an essay first published in 1742 and entitled "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing."

This essay is, to my mind, by no means easy to follow. In it Hume discusses the difficulty of finding a mean or balance between the two shifty concepts denoted by his title terms and yoked there, rather debatably, it turns out, by and. "Simplicity," as Hume explains this abstraction, is allied with "nature" and is a stylistic ideal that few readers will appreciate if it is not accompanied by "refinement," which includes "elegant" language and "uncommon" observations. The title terms, as the essay gradually unfolds their multiple meanings, seem to exist in more of an antithetical relation ("simplicity or refinement"?) than a complementary one. Hume's aim, however, is to discover what constitutes a "just mixture of simplicity and refinement in writing" (193). The answer to this question leads Hume to a discussion of a "proper medium" of style that "lies not in a point, but admits of a considerable latitude"-a latitude explained by a wide variety of examples signaled simply by capitalized proper names of figures from different eras and writing in different languages and traditions. Occupying Hume's "proper medium" of style are Pope, Parnell, Lucretius, Corneille, Congreve, Sophocles, Terence, Virgil, and Racine; the latter two are singled out as being "nearest the center," that is, "the farthest removed from both the extremities" of "refinement and simplicity" (193-94). Only a reader of considerable education and with considerable power to infer stylistic qualities from Hume's very elliptical illustrations will grasp what this concept of a "proper medium" of style entails; indeed, Hume's argument comes to be more about the nature and education of readers than about "simplicity and refinement," understood as qualities intrinsic to a style of writing. Simplicity, allied with a concept of "the natural" and-obliquely, I suggest, with Puritan theories about the virtue of "plain speaking"-is a more relative notion than most readers, even the "persons of taste" to whom Hume's essay seems to be addressed (191),may have thought; for, as Hume begins to explain in his second paragraph, sentiments that are "merely natural" "affect not the mind with any pleasure." Hume illustrates this point by referring to the mental and verbal productions of four lower-class groups or types: "The pleasantries of a waterman, the observations of a peasant, the ribaldry of a porter or hackney coachmen, all of these are natural, and disagreeable" (191). Whether as producers of "hackneyed" discourse or as objects to be imitated in the discourse of "persons of taste," such lower-class persons will not properly illustrate the ideal of natural simplicity that Hume is complexly defining. "Nothing can please persons of taste, but nature drawn with all her graces and ornaments, la belle nature" (192). Hume's statement here, with its untranslated French phrase ("the beautiful nature"), implicitly defines "persons of taste" as those who know more than one language-and also as those who reject Puritan injunctions against verbal "ornament." The proper mixture of "simplicity and refinement," the essay seems to say, is as much a function of the reader as of the writer.

I am by no means offering a full interpretation of Hume's short but highly dialectical essay; I am, however, hoping that my citations of and reflections on Hume will show that his prose style displays some of the very qualities Nussbaum so dislikes in Butler's prose ("casual allusion," for instance, where the disagreements among the figures invoked are not fully explained). In the significant although shifting weight Hume gives to the notion of "uncommon opinions," moreover, he joins Butler, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson (among others) in pointing to the intellectual value of not being too kind to your real or imagined readers. "Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar," Adorno wrote in the Minima Moralia, in a sentence that has been quoted more than once in recent debates about "badness" in academic writing. Brecht's stress on the value of the "alienation effect" in drama (Verfremdungseffekt); the Russian formalists' interest in strategies of "defamiliarization" (ostranenie), including techniques of "barbarizing" or "deforming" stylistic norms;Adorno's scorn for the "ideologies" of "lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision," as he called them in his 1956 essay "Punctuation Marks"; Benjamin's concept of "writing against the grain"-these are well-known modernist versions, I suggest, of Hume's search for a style capable of expressing "uncommon opinions." The modernist versions, however, have seemingly relinquished Hume's hope (hedged by irony) that "uncommon" opinions and "refinement" of language could somehow be "mixed" with something that a "person of taste" would recognize as stylistic "simplicity."

The quest for a style that would convey "uncommon opinions," whether through Humean "simplicity" or through modernist gestures of aggressive violation of "common" notions of decorum in prose or poetry, is also a quest for a certain kind of reader, one educated, as I now want to suggest, in what has been, for many centuries in the West, an altogether "uncommon" language. That language cannot be simply described as "one" language, nor can it accurately be described as one's own vernacular tongue. Although ideas of moral goodness (and social superiority) have historically accompanied this language (these languages), such ideas are perhaps, at this historical juncture, more in need of analysis than of endorsement. To illustrate this point, let me turn to the tradition of writing about language that separates one "good" or "noble" language from many languages considered "bad" or "vulgar"; moral judgments are intricately tied to social ones in this tradition, which helped to shape many later formulations about the relation between good writing and moral (or social) superiority of a few over the many or, in the modern American inversion of this idea, of the many over the few. Historically, the literate elite happened to be mostly men; and the kind of language use they defined as good was allied to an ideal of Latin as a universal, imperial, and written, as well as spoken, language superior to local dialects. These latter were, for most of the medieval period, spoken but not written languages. One name for them, in some territories claimed by the French monarchy, was patois. Before the fifteenth century this word denoted "incomprehensible speech"; between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, however, it came, according to Pierre Bourdieu, to signify "a corrupted and coarse speech, such as that of the common or `vulgar' people." Predating and helping us to understand that symptomatic change in the way in which the sociological fact of linguistic diversity was perceived by members of a literate elite is Roger Bacon's treatise on Greek Grammar. Written in the late thirteenth century, Bacon's text reflects on the distinction between the "one" (Latin derived from Greek) and the "many" (vernacular dialects). He defines the former as a "substance" to be discerned in the usage of those who know Latin; the vernaculars, in contrast to the philosophically and theologically charged notion of substancia, are implicitly defined as like the Aristotelian "attributes" of Absolute Being. Bacon thus neatly occludes the fact that some vernaculars (languages he classifies as "Teutonic," for instance) were not descended from Latin and hence are not properly described by the substancia metaphor, which makes subordinate languages ontologically dependent on Latin. Linguistic "substance" thus, with elegant circularity, becomes a quasi-divine and all-encompassing phenomenon revealed only in the usage of the "literate," defined as clerks and others who know Latin; variability is ejected, by definition, from the idea of Latin:

In lingua enim latina que vna est, sunt multa idiomata. Substancia enim ipsius lingue consistit in hijs in quibus communicant clerici et literati omnes. Idiomata vero sunt multa secundum multitudinem nacionum vtencium hac lingua. Quia aliter in multis pronunciant et scribunt ytalici, et aliter hyspani, et aliter gallici, et aliter teutonici et aliter anglici et ceteri.

[For in that Latin language which is one, there are many idioms. But their substance consists in that language in which clerks and literate persons communicate. Idioms are many according to the number of nations using that language. Therefore it is pronounced and written differently by Italians, and differently by Hispanics, and differently by Gauls, and by us, and by English people etcetera.]

Late medieval clerkly arguments like Bacon's for Latin as "one" versus the vernacular tongues as "many" frequently define Latin as the lineal heir to the two other ancient languages most closely associated with divine being and learning, Greek and Hebrew. This view of Latin implicitly privileges a foreign language learned in school by a small and mostly male portion of the population over native or "mother" tongues of various kinds. Building on this line of speculation, some medieval theorists of language insisted that the "conventional" mode of signification that Aristotle had regarded as characteristic of language in general is truly typical only of vernacular languages; Latin words, in contrast, signify in an "almost ontological" way, as the modern critic Serge Lusignan puts it in his book Parler Vulgairement (42-43). The notion of a divine ground (and origin) of Latin signification contributes not a little, Lusignan speculates, to the exalted idea of grammar we find in many late-medieval treatises; and the synonymy of grammar and Latin contributes in turn to an idea we find in works from Giles de Rome's De regimine principum (c. 1285) through Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia (c. 1306) to Joachim Du Bellay's Deffense et illustration de la langue franoyse (1549) and Richard Mulcaster's Positions (1581). This is the idea that the "paternal" language of Latin is more "complete and perfect" than any vulgar tongue, a better instrument for expressing "the nature of things, the customs of men, the course of the stars and all of that which [men] wish to discuss."

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0804747105
• ISBN 13: 9780804747103
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 224
• Redattore: Culler Jonathan, Amb Kevin
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile