Just Being Difficult ?

Academic Writing in the Public Arena

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Edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb

Stanford University Press

Due/Published July 2003, 240 pages, paper

ISBN 0804747105

Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them.

In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

"This collection is a remarkable and rational contribution to a passionate contemporary debate. Is academic writing unjustifiably obscure? The claim has been widely made in media ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The New Republic and Philosophy and Literature. Just Being Difficult? offers a thoughtful, generally unpolemical, stimulating, and learned series of analyses of the claim, of those its targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended public and the audiences beyond it."--Richard Terdiman, University of California, Santa Cruz

Review

Criticizing and parodying contemporary academic writing has grown into a cottage industry. The journal Philosophy and Literature has a year-end award for bad writing and a variety of mainstream publications lambast prominent, primarily leftist, theorists for their opaque, difficult, and ultimately, “bad” writing. In Just Being Difficult?, prominent theorists take a closer look at academic writing and what’s at stake in debates about “bad” writing. Admitting that some academic writing, including their own, is often obscure and difficult, the contributors also argue that this choice reinforces one of theory’s primary tasks. More precisely, by calling attention to their own unconventional writing style, theorists emphasize theory’s calling to investigate language. The essays in this collection consider academic writing from a variety of perspectives: its historical development, its political implications, its relationship to academic institutions, and its relationship to modernism. Going beyond the frequently superficial assaults by their critics, this distinguished group of academic theorists provide a nuanced defense of “bad” writing and the relevance of theory.

Essays include:

• “Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down,” Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb
• “Difficult Style and ‘Illustrious’ Vernaculars: A Historical Perspective,” Margaret Ferguson
• “Hume’s Learned and Conversable Worlds,” Robin Valenza and John Bender
• “Bad Writing and Good Philosophy,” Jonathan Culler
• “The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning,” John McCumber
• “Feminism’s Broken English,” Robyn Wiegman
• “The Resistance of Theory; or, The Worth of Agony,” Rey Chow
• “Styles of Intellectual Publics,” Michael Warner
• “On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity,” Peter Brooks
• “Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” Robert Kaufman
• “Bad Writing,” Barbara Johnson
• “The Morality of Form; or, What’s ‘Bad’ about ‘Bad Writing’?”, David Palumbo-Liu
• “The Politics of the Production of Knowledge: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Stuart J. Murray
• “Values of Difficulty,” Judith Butler