A backhanded 'thank you' for the Judith Butler quotation. I have been forced to hack through acres of similar verbiage in the course of proof-reading tasks. At no point did my eyes glaze over and I concede nobody would notice the odd missed apostrophe or absent conjunction amongst the overgrowth of pseudoanalysis. Honest.
Literary scholars, like Butler, have no way of asserting that they understand the human condition in any way other than analysis of literary texts. Since we don’t actually live in novels, and have to deal with material realities that are actually measurable, they resort to obfuscatory language both to sound profound, and to disguise the fact that they have not the least fucking idea about reality.
You're forgetting that any word they use can mean anything they want it to. Functionally, their lexicon is infinite. They can, and do, express things far exceeding their comprehension.
It seems, at least at first blush, hard to believe. I've known many brilliant people in literary studies--huge vocabularies--who are on the Left. Perhaps becoming a committed left-winger, though, tends to reduce fluency by mandating the repetition of key phrases. But even that seems a stretch, I must admit. Still, fascinating tidbit.
Perhaps I ought to have said 'self-limiting'. The repetition of phrases and jargon from the Lacan/Derrida/Foucault/Butler Approved Lexicon is indeed the core of the issue. There is probably also a list of words once used by C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton which are forbidden by academic publishers.
A backhanded 'thank you' for the Judith Butler quotation. I have been forced to hack through acres of similar verbiage in the course of proof-reading tasks. At no point did my eyes glaze over and I concede nobody would notice the odd missed apostrophe or absent conjunction amongst the overgrowth of pseudoanalysis. Honest.
That's incredibly difficult work.
I once went through an entire chapter capitalising bell hooks name. They really hate men.
Literary scholars, like Butler, have no way of asserting that they understand the human condition in any way other than analysis of literary texts. Since we don’t actually live in novels, and have to deal with material realities that are actually measurable, they resort to obfuscatory language both to sound profound, and to disguise the fact that they have not the least fucking idea about reality.
How do you proofread people who routinely redefine the entire lexicon on the fly?
You'd be surprised. Postmodernist academics have an astonishingly limited vocabulary.
You're forgetting that any word they use can mean anything they want it to. Functionally, their lexicon is infinite. They can, and do, express things far exceeding their comprehension.
I didn't know that!
It seems, at least at first blush, hard to believe. I've known many brilliant people in literary studies--huge vocabularies--who are on the Left. Perhaps becoming a committed left-winger, though, tends to reduce fluency by mandating the repetition of key phrases. But even that seems a stretch, I must admit. Still, fascinating tidbit.
Perhaps I ought to have said 'self-limiting'. The repetition of phrases and jargon from the Lacan/Derrida/Foucault/Butler Approved Lexicon is indeed the core of the issue. There is probably also a list of words once used by C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton which are forbidden by academic publishers.
I'm sure that's the case.