File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-10.220, message 65


From: "Per I. Mathisen" <perim-AT-interlink.no>
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 17:04:38 +0000
Subject: (Fwd) Bad Writing Contest winners (fwd)


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Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1996 22:15:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre <pagre-AT-weber.ucsd.edu>
To: rre-AT-weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Bad Writing Contest winners

[I normally snort at anything that resembles
anti-intellectualism, but I have a sense of humor too...]

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Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 20:44:07 -0400
From: Denis Dutton <FINA012-AT-cantva.canterbury.ac.nz>
To: skeptic-AT-listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
Subject: Bad Writing Contest winners

Feel free to copy this announcement elsewhere on the
internet.

Bad Writing Contest: Winners Announced

We are pleased to announce winners of the second Bad Writing
Contest, sponsored  by the journal Philosophy and Literature
and its internet discussion group, PHIL-LIT.    

The challenge of the Bad Writing Contest is to come up with
the ugliest, most stylistically awful single sentence-or
string of no more than three sentences-found in a published
scholarly book or article.  Ordinary journalism, fiction,
etc. not allowed, nor is translation from other languages
into English.  Entries must be non-ironic, from actual
serious academic journals or books-parodies cannot be
admitted in a field where unintentional self-parody is so
rampant.  

Note that much of the writing we would consider "bad" is not
necessarily incompetent.  Graduate students and young
scholars please pay attention: 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-in 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.

Third prize was such a problem that we decided to award more
than one.  Exactly what the prizes will be is uncertain (the
first three prizes were to be books), but something nice
will be found.  (Perhaps: third prize, an old copy of Glyph;
fourth prize two old copies of Glyph.) 

Jack Kolb of UCLA found this sentence in Paul Fry's A
Defense of Poetry (Stanford University Press, 1995). 
Together with the previous winners, it proves that 1995 was
a vintage year bad prose.  Fry writes: 

"It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the
absentation of actuality from the concept in part through
its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the
helplessness-rather than the will to power-of its fall into
conceptuality."  

Incidentally, Kolb is reviewing Fry's book for Philosophy
and Literature, and he generally respects it. 

Arthur J. Weitzman of Northeastern University has noted for
us two helpful sentences from The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and
Martin Kreiswirth (JHUP, 1994).  It is from Donald E.
Pease's entry on Harold Bloom: 

"Previous exercises in influence study depended upon a
topographical model of reallocatable poetic images,
distributed more or less equally within 'canonical' poems,
each part of which expressively totalized the entelechy of
the entire tradition.  But Bloom now understood this
cognitive map of interchangeable organic wholes to be
criticism's repression of poetry's will to overcome time's
anteriority."  

William Dolphin of San Francisco State University located
this elegant sentence in John Guillory's Cultural Capital:
The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of
Chicago Press, 1993): 

"A politics presuming the ontological indifference of all
minority social identities as defining oppressed or
dominated groups, a politics in which differences are
sublimated in the constitution of a minority identity (the
identity politics which is increasingly being questioned
within feminism itself) can recover the differences between
social identities only on the basis of common and therefore
commensurable experiences of marginalization, which
experiences in turn yield a political practice that consists
largely of affirming the identities specific to those
experiences."  

Finally, the Canadian David Savory found this lucid sentence
in the essay by Robyn Wiegman and Linda Zwinger, in "Tonya's
Bad Boot," an essay in Women on Ice, edited by Cynthia
Baughman (Routledge, 1995): 

"Punctuated by what became ubiquitous sound bites-Tonya
dashing after the tow truck, Nancy sailing the ice with one
leg reaching for heaven-this melodrama parsed the
transgressive hybridity of un-narrativized representative
bodies back into recognizable heterovisual codes."

Thanks to all the entrants.  The next round of the Bad
Writing Contest, prizes to be announced, is now open with a
deadline of September 30, 1996.  There is an endless ocean
of pretentious, turgid academic prose being added to daily,
and we'll continue to celebrate it.  Details of the new
contest will appear on the internet discussion group
PHIL-LIT.

***************

Philosophy and Literature, a scholarly journal from the
Johns Hopkins University Press, is soon to mark its
twentieth anniversary.  Editor: Denis Dutton, University of
Canterbury, New Zealand; Coeditor, Patrick Henry, Whitman
College, Washington.

d.dutton-AT-fina.canterbury.ac.nz

Denis Dutton is past President and current Media Spokesbeing
of the New Zealand Skeptics.




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