Posted on 02/13/2008 2:09:06 PM PST by bs9021
No Relation to Rhett
by: Bethany Stotts, February 13, 2008
Chicago, Ill.—At a panel on “Revision as Writing, Writing as Revision,” Modern Language Association (MLA) panelists offered tips to increase the clarity and quality of academic writing ...
In direct contrast to the other panelists’ emphasis on cogency and understandable writing, Birkenstein-Graff suggested that academic writers look to “Bad Writing Award” winner Judith Butler for inspiration. According to the UI Chicago lecturer, Butler is a “masterful, masterful writer” who “directly engages what her harshest critics say about her work.”...
One topical sentence from Butler’s 2004 Bodies That Matter reads “The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of ‘sex,’ and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.” In other words, someone seeking to define one’s own sexuality must abjectly repudiate his or her real sexuality in favor of the social sexual construct. Or, put even more simply, one cannot define sexuality without operating within social norms. ...
...Butler later writes that “Insofar as the phallus is an idealization of morphology, it produces a necessary effect of inadequation, one which, in the cultural context of lesbian relations, can be quickly assimilated to the sense of an inadequate derivation from the supposedly real thing, and, hence, a source of shame."....
In 1999, Butler received the “Bad Writing Award” from Philosophy and Literature. The journal’s editor, Denis Dutton, wrote..."[Butler’s winning] sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it,” wrote Dutton.
Birkenstein-Graff implied, however, that the attacks on Butler’s writing came not from the construction of her sentences but because her opponents disagreed with Butler’s theses....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
No one...NO ONE...understood the author - who wrote like this author did in the article...
We concluded it was published just to stroke the author's ego and sense of "command" of high level english...
The only book in grad school I sold back after the semester was over...ugh.
Writing good English is hard! It comes naturally to some, but others drag it along on a leash.
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