Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena

Jonathan D. Culler, Kevin Lamb

Stanford University Press, 2003 - Education - 223 pages

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.

Contents

• Dressing Up Dressing Down: 1
• A Historical: 15
• Humes Learned and Conversable Worlds: 29
• Bad Writing and Good Philosophy: 43
• The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning: 58
• Feminisms Broken English: 75
• The Resistance of Theory or The Worth of Agony: 95
• Styles of Intellectual Publics: 106
• Part j Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness: 129
• Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics: 139
• Bad Writing: 157
• The Morality of Form or Whats Bad about Bad Writing?: 171
• An Interview with: 181
• Values of Difficulty: 199
• Contributors: 217

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena; Cultural Memory in the Present
• Editors: Jonathan D. Culler, Kevin Lamb
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0804747105, 9780804747103
• Length: 223 pages
• Subjects: Education / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory