Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 09:00:34 -0600 From: tomdill-AT-wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM) Subject: Re: Butler & Nussbaum & Bad Writing Martha Nussbaum is a fine scholar and has a fairly solid reputation, but she has involved herself here in the ongoing backlash against European "theory" that has its public harlequinade in the rants of Camille Paglia and its more serious efforts going among the traditionalists who have broken from the MLA and other organizations to try to reassert the hegemony of the formalist and philological practices that more or less peaked during the 1950's. One very easy line of attack characterizes the "jargon" that (they will aver) is all there is to postmodern theory--that without its complex and daunting language, there would be "no clothes." You can see these endlessly repeated plaints on a number of academic lists, with the permanent home being a list called PHIL-LIT. Nussbaum is capable of serious analysis (as are some others) and probably provides some, but the ideological underpinning of these attacks almost always reveals itself and undercuts the value of the discussion. Tom Dillingham
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