Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena by Jonathan Culler, Kevin Lamb

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Synopsis

Poststructuralists, cultural studies professors, literary critics, and other academic writers are frequently accused of being deliberately elitist and obfuscatory in their work, a charge that has led to the annual awarding of a bad writing award by the journal Philosophy and Literature. Rather than simply counter the charges, Culler and Lamb (both affiliated with the English department of Cornell U., one as a professor and the other as a graduate student) are interested in the assumptions about the purposes, audiences, and preferences of academic writing that underlie these criticisms. Issues of clarity in writing and the question of the rightness of clarity's primacy in communication is discussed in the context of Plato's repudiation of the Sophists, Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, and Hume's distinction between "learned" and "conversable" worlds. Later articles move to more contemporary issues, examining the politics embedded in discussions of institutions, publics, and intellectual labor, as well as the question of the ethics of obscure language. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Biography

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.