On Aug 21, 2:41 pm, kevirwin
comcast.net> wrote:> On Aug 19, 8:40 pm, turtoni
fastmail.net> wrote:
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>> PM - Monday, 13 August , 2007 18:34:00
>> Reporter: Mark Colvin
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>> MARK COLVIN: "The fight against bad English is not frivolous", said
>> George Orwell, who argued that, "the slovenliness of our language
>> makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts". These days one of
>> the strongest proponents of Orwell's argument that sloppy writing
>> breeds sloppy thinking is a man called Denis Dutton.
>
>> A professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New
>> Zealand, Denis Dutton is also editor of the website Arts and Letters
>> Daily, and for some years he ran an extremely successful annual Bad
>> Writing contest for turgid prose from around the world.
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>> Denis Dutton is in Sydney for tonight's CIS Big Ideas forum, and I
>> asked him today about his campaign against bad writing.
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>> DENIS DUTTON: I was finally so sick of the awful writing that was
>> coming out English departments in particular in the 1990s that I
>> decided to use the Internet to solicit entries in a bad writing
>> contest. And the rules were that it had to be published writing, that
>> it had to be published by a university press or a reputable publisher.
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>> It couldn't be a translation from another language into English, it
>> had to have been written originally in English, and I think above all,
>> and most important, no parodies were allowed, because where ... self-
>> parody is so completely prevalent, so you can't actually allow
>> parodies.
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>> MARK COLVIN: Did a lot of people enter?
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>> DENIS DUTTON: Oh yes.
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>> MARK COLVIN: Obviously, they weren't entering their own work.
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>> DENIS DUTTON: No, well no one was entering their own work. I mean, one
>> of the things about it is I think this particular contest hurt very
>> badly a lot of people academically, because academics of the sort of
>> pretentious self-important stripe that I was targeting in the Bad
>> Writing Contest were people who above all, take themselves very
>> seriously.
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>> If you criticise them, from any kind of a commonsensical point of
>> view, or you know, an establishment point of view, they love it. They
>> want to be excoriated by what they consider to be the "establishment",
>> although they of course, they're the academic establishment
>> themselves.
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>> The one thing they can't stand is to be laughed at, and I think the
>> Bad Writing Contest, by making a laughing-stock of so many people, so
>> many well-known academics all over the Internet and in the New York
>> Times and the BBC and everyone who covered it, it did its job.
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>> MARK COLVIN: Can you recall any particular examples, winners of your
>> Bad Writing Contest?
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>> DENIS DUTTON: Well, I was just looking over some papers here. I should
>> say the particular quotation which is only a single sentence, the one
>> that got it going in my mind, I was sitting, you know, I think in my
>> easy chair at home and I picked up a book called The End of Education:
>> Toward Posthumanism, written by an English professor, and this was the
>> first sentence in the book: "This book was instigated by the Harvard
>> core curriculum report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I
>> took to be an ominous educational reform initiative, that without
>> naming it would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure
>> of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning
>> with the state's brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam and the
>> consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by
>> hitherto marginalised constituencies of American society for
>> enfranchisement".
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>> MARK COLVIN: That's a sentence.
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>> DENIS DUTTON: That's a sentence, and it's written by an English
>> professor whose job must be to teach people how to write. And it can't
>> be inadvertent because it's the first sentence in his book. And it was
>> at that point that I thought, "Well, there should be a contest that
>> actually puts altogether the very worst examples".
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>> One of the more famous examples was one written by Professor Judith
>> Butler of the University of California, Berkeley in the journal
>> Diacritics. Now, she is a professor of rhetoric.
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>> Anyway here's ... here is the sentence from Professor Butler: "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 the 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".
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>> MARK COLVIN: Enough. My eyes are crossing.
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>> DENIS DUTTON: Well you know, it's interesting because you see when you
>> read something like that, that the point is not communication at all.
>> The point is that you are to fall on your knees before her and bow
>> because she is such an elevated person.
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>> MARK COLVIN: But, I was going to ask you, if you understood some of
>> what she was saying there - I don't even know what Althusserian means
>> - but if you do understand it, is there an excuse for it?
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>> DENIS DUTTON: Well, that was quite interesting because when that came
>> out on a number of email lists, various professors and scholars
>> started arguing about it. And quite a few of them said, "Oh, this is
>> ridiculous. Just because she is writing something difficult and
>> technical doesn't mean it's clear. I mean, this is what it means".
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>> And that person would ... but someone else would come and, "No, wait a
>> minute, it can't mean that". And the arguments, the endless arguments
>> about what it actually did mean from her sympathisers told the whole
>> tale.
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>> MARK COLVIN: Academia is not the only area in which the language is
>> being beaten around, prostituted, whatever you want to call it. The
>> battle is hardly won is it? Even though you've given up your bad
>> writing contest.
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>> DENIS DUTTON: Well, I mean we just gave it up because it was too much
>> work and it seems the point had been made, though people still write
>> me and wish that I would reinstitute it. But, oh I don't know, there's
>> other fish to fry.
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>> You know, I'm not against hard subjects, which require difficult
>> writing. Kant, a philosopher, whom I greatly respect and have spent
>> much of my life studying Kant is a very difficult philosopher to read.
>> And Aristotle is not always easy. Wittgenstein is hard.
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>> But these thinkers are hard because they're working at the very limits
>> of what they can understand, and they're trying to make it clear. It's
>> an honest attempt. What gets me about so much of the poststructuralist
>> jargon is the fundamental dishonesty, the pretentiousness, the idea
>> that we are writing in such a style that we are the deep thinkers of
>> the age. Well, rubbish.
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>> MARK COLVIN: Professor Denis Dutton, who among other things, is the
>> editor of the remarkable website Arts and Letters Daily.
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> That was pretty interesting..And the guy was from New Zealand....Say,
> isn't there some other gifted wordsmith in this forum from New Zealand
> as well?? You know, the guy making all those references about Kant,
> like the good professor...
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