On Aug 22, 4:13 am, kevirwin
comcast.net> wrote:> On Aug 22, 3:37 am, turtoni
fastmail.net> wrote:
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>>> 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
>
>>>> 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.
>
>>>> 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...
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>>> K e v- Hide quoted text -
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> 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.... ??????
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> Was their singing suposed to be as mind-boggling as some of the quoted
> passages from the dialogue between Mark & Denis???
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> lost in cyberspace,
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my sloppy writing. your orginal post boggling too. ha!
