On Aug 22, 3:37 am, turtoni
fastmail.net> wrote:> On Aug 21, 2:41 pm, kevirwin
comcast.net> wrote:
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>>> On Aug 19, 8:40 pm, turtoni
fastmail.net> wrote:>
>
>>> PM - Monday, 13 August , 2007 18:34:00
>>> Reporter: Mark Colvin
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> Denis Dutton is in Sydney for tonight's CIS Big Ideas forum, and I
>>> asked him today about his campaign against bad writing.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> MARK COLVIN: Did a lot of people enter?
>
>>> DENIS DUTTON: Oh yes.
>
>>> MARK COLVIN: Obviously, they weren't entering their own work.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> MARK COLVIN: Can you recall any particular examples, winners of your
>>> Bad Writing Contest?
>
>>> 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".
>
>>> MARK COLVIN: That's a sentence.
>
>>> 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".
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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".
>
>>> MARK COLVIN: Enough. My eyes are crossing.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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?
>
>>> 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".
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> 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.
>
>>> MARK COLVIN: Professor Denis Dutton, who among other things, is the
>>> editor of the remarkable website Arts and Letters Daily.
>
>> 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...
>
>> K e v- Hide quoted text -
>
>> - Show quoted text -
Okay, maybe because it's 4:00am here on the east coast of the USA and
I'm tired, but I have *no* idea what the meaning was of that link.. By
the operating mechanisms of this forum, it appeared you were replying
to my post, but.... ??????
Was their singing suposed to be as mind-boggling as some of the quoted
passages from the dialogue between Mark & Denis???
lost in cyberspace,
K e v
