Bad Writing Winners (fwd)

[Michael Gurstein]

Anyone care to comment...

M

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Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 12:25:46 -0800
From: Caspar Davis <prana at coastnet.com>
To: futurework at dijkstra.uwaterloo.ca
Subject: Bad Writing Winners

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Full text at:

http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily

We are pleased to announce winners of the fourth Bad Writing Contest,
sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature.

The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable
passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last
few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, departmental memos, etc. are
not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from
serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot
be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.

Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S.
are among those who wrote winning entries in the latest contest.

Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric
and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley,
admired as perhaps "one of the ten smartest people on the planet,"
wrote the sentence that captured the contest's first prize. Homi K.
Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of
postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.

"As usual," commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and
Literature, "this year's winners were produced by well-known,
highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like
this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by
the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished
presses and academic journals."

Professor Butler's first-prize sentence appears in "Further Reflections
on the Conversations of Our Time," an article in the scholarly journal
Diacritics (1997):

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of
structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with
the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Dutton remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of
such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon
University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest
people on the planet'."

This year's second prize went to a sentence authored by Homi K. Bhabha,
a professor of English at the University of Chicago. He writes in The
Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of
discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification,
pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and
classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize'
formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the
rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters of the
University of Iowa, who describes it as "quite splendid: enunciatory
modality, indeed!"

Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol in the U.K.,
supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled
Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" (Princeton University Press, 1996):

"As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined,
the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in
Manet's work of 'les noms du père,' a Lacanian romance of the errant
paternal phallus ('Les Non-dupes errent'), a revised Freudian novella
of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence
enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of
insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and
child."