Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 02:25:47 -0400 (EDT)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: BHA: RB wins first prize in philosophy competition


I thought this snippet from the internet might be of interest to some members
of this list


The PHIL-LIT/Philosophy and Literature
Bad Writing Contest:
Results for Round Two


The entries for the second run of the Bad Writing Contest have now been
tabulated, and we are pleased to announce winners. But first a few tedious
words. There is no question that we have better--if that's how to put
it--entries than the last time we ran the contest. Some of the entries are
stunning, and we think almost all of them deserve a prize of some sort.

This is not to say that much of the writing we would consider "bad" is
necessarily incompetent. Graduate students and young scholars please note:
many of the writers represented have worked years to attain their styles and
they have been rewarded with publication in books and journal articles. In
fact, if they weren't published, we wouldn't have them for our contest. That
these passages constitute bad writing is merely our opinion; it is arguable
that anyone wanting to pursue an academic career should assiduously imitate
such styles as are represented here. These are your role models.

First prize goes to David Spurrett of the University of Natal in South
Africa. He found this marvelous sentence--yes, it's but one sentence--from
Roy Bhaskar's Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution
(Verso, 1994): 

"Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of
Foucauldian strategic reversal--of the unholy trinity of
Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the
Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice,
fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious
exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or
psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial
failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally,
the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid
down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist
monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical
connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he
inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason,
replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to
the superidealism of a Baudrillard."

It's a splendid bit of prose and I'm certain many of us will now attempt to
read it aloud without taking a breath. The jacket blurb, incidentally,
informs us that this is the author's "most accessible book to date."

Second Prize is won by Jennifer Harris of the University of Toronto. She
found a grand sentence in an essay by Stephen T. Tyman called "Ricoeur and
the Problem of Evil," in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, edited, it says, by
Lewis Edwin Hahn (Open Court, 1995): 

"With the last gasp of Romanticism, the quelling of its florid uprising
against the vapid formalism of one strain of the Enlightenment, the dimming
of its yearning for the imagined grandeur of the archaic, and the dashing of
its too sanguine hopes for a revitalized, fulfilled humanity, the horror of
its more lasting, more Gothic legacy has settled in, distributed and diffused
enough, to be sure, that lugubriousness is recognizable only as languor, or
as a certain sardonic laconicism disguising itself in a new sanctification of
the destructive instincts, a new genius for displacing cultural reifications
in the interminable shell game of the analysis of the human psyche, where
nothing remains sacred."

Speaking of shell games, see if you can figure out the subject of that
sentence.


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