winershh

[Joseph M Green]

The subscribers of this list will undoubtedly wish to learn
of the results of the bad writing contest help recently in
New Zealand. It looks like the theorists have swept the board:

From: IN%"D.Du...@fina.canterbury.ac.nz" 2-MAY-1996 00:42:00.53

The PHIL-LIT/_Philosophy and Literature_ Bad Writing Contest:
Results for round two. The entries for the second run of the Bad Writing Contest have now
been tabulated, and we are pleased to announce winners. But first a
few tedious words. There is no question that we have better--if that's
how to put it--entries than the last time we ran the contest. Some of
the entries are stunning, and we think almost all of them deserve a
prize of some sort.

This is not to say that much of the writing we would consider "bad" is
necessarily incompetent. Graduate students and young scholars
please note: many of the writers represented have worked years to
attain their styles and they have been rewarded with publication in
books and journal articles. In fact, if they weren't published, we
wouldn't have them for our contest. That these passages constitute
bad writing is merely our opinion; it is arguable that for anyone
wanting to pursue an academic career should assiduously imitate
such styles as are represented here. These are you role models.

First prize goes to David Spurrett of the University of Natal in South
Africa. He found this marvelous sentence--yes, it's but one
sentence--from Roy Bhaskar's _Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy
and Their Resolution_ (Verso, 1994): "Indeed dialectical critical
realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic
-The entries for the second run of the Bad Writing Contest have now
been tabulated, and we are pleased to announce winners. But first a
few tedious words. There is no question that we have better--if that's
how to put it--entries than the last time we ran the contest. Some of
the entries are stunning, and we think almost all of them deserve a
prize of some sort.

This is not to say that much of the writing we would consider "bad" is
necessarily incompetent. Graduate students and young scholars
please note: many of the writers represented have worked years to
attain their styles and they have been rewarded with publication in
books and journal articles. In fact, if they weren't published, we
wouldn't have them for our contest. That these passages constitute
bad writing is merely our opinion; it is arguable that for anyone
wanting to pursue an academic career should assiduously imitate
such styles as are represented here. These are you role models.

First prize goes to David Spurrett of the University of Natal in South
Africa. He found this marvelous sentence--yes, it's but one
sentence--from Roy Bhaskar's _Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy
and Their Resolution_ (Verso, 1994): "Indeed dialectical critical
realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic
-against the vapid formalism of one strain of the Enlightenment, the
dimming of its yearning for the imagined grandeur of the archaic,
and the dashing of its too sanguine hopes for a revitalized, fulfilled
humanity, the horror of its more lasting, more Gothic legacy has
settled in, distributed and diffused enough, to be sure, that
lugubriousness is recognizable only as languor, or as a certain
sardonic laconicism disguising itself in a new sanctification of the
destructive instincts, a new genius for displacing cultural reifications
in the interminable shell game of the analysis of the human psyche,
where nothing remains sacred." Speaking of shell games, see if you
can figure out the subject of that sentence.

Third prize was such a problem that we decided to award more than
one. Exactly what the prizes will be is uncertain (the first three prizes
were to be books), but something nice will be found. (Perhaps: third
prize, an old copy of _Glyph_; fourth prize two old copies of
_Glyph_.)

Jack Kolb of UCLA found this sentence in Paul Fry's _A Defense of
Poetry_ (Stanford University Press, 1995). Together with the
previous winners, it proves that 1995 was to bad prose what 1685 was
to good music. Fry writes, "It is the moment of non-construction,
disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part
--through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the
helplessness--rather than the will to power--of its fall into
conceptuality." Incidentally, Kolb is reviewing Fry's book for
_Philosophy and Literature_, and believe it or not he generally
respects it.

Arthur J. Weitzman of Northeastern University has noted for us two
helpful sentences from _The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
and Criticism_, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth
(JHUP, 1994). It is from Donald E. Pease's entry on Harold Bloom:
"Previous exercises in influence study depended upon a topographical
model of reallocatable poetic images, distributed more or less equally
within 'canonical' poems, each part of which expressively totalized
the entelechy of the entire tradition. But Bloom now understood this
cognitive map of interchangeable organic wholes to be criticism's
repression of poetry's will to overcome time's anteriority." What can
we add to that?

William Dolphin of San Francisco State University located for us this
elegant sentence in John Guillory's _Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Formation_ (University of Chicago Press, 1993): "A
politics presuming the ontological indifference of all minority social
identities as defining oppressed or dominated groups, a politics in
--Mwhich differences are sublimated in the constitution of a minority
identity (the identity politics which is increasingly being questioned
within feminism itself) can recover the differences between social
identities only on the basis of common and therefore commensurable
experiences of marginalization, which experiences in turn yield a
political practice that consists largely of _affirming_ the identities
specific to those experiences."

And speaking of marginalization, where, you may ask, are women in
this? Aren't we being exclusionary? Indeed, it's frankly unfair that
men should have all the fun, but the gallant Canadian David Savory
found this lucid sentence in the essay "Tonya's Bad Boot," in _Women
on Ice_, edited by Cynthia Baughman: "This melodrama parsed the
transgressive hybridity of un-narrativized representative bodies back
into recognizable heterovisual codes."

Thanks to these and all the other entrants. If you didn't this time, the
next round of the Bad Writing Contest, prizes to be announced, is
now open with a deadline of September 30, 1996. So you've plenty of
time to find examples from the turgid new world of academic prose.
Details of the new contest will appear on PHIL-LIT. Winners of this
contest, watch for your prizes in the mail.

[Joseph M Green]

Damn, I see the winning sentence was lost in transmission. Sorry.

[Joseph M Green]

First prize goes to David Spurrett of the University of Natal in South
Africa. He found this marvelous sentence--yes, it's but one
sentence--from Roy Bhaskar's _Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy
and Their Resolution_ (Verso, 1994): "Indeed dialectical critical
realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic

reversal--of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean
provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm,
of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and
irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power
or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source)
new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy,
ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with
its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which
Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic
reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection,
while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the
Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason,
replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation
route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard." It's a splendid bit of
prose and I'm certain many of us will now attempt to read it aloud
without taking a breath. The jacket blurb, incidentally, informs us
that this is the author's "most accessible book to date."