No, Not a Coincidence
In a way I hesitate to make this criticism, because the writer of this letter also wrote a good one on another issue. But I just feel compelled to make this one comment, because people keep saying the same thing, and it keeps being wrong and point-missing.
The author would do good to actually address the issues of trying to articulate what hasn’t been articulated before rather than simply trashing everyone who tries to write on difficult issues.
The trouble with that is that I’m emphatically not ‘trashing everyone who tries to write on difficult issues,’ and I never said I was. I’m ‘trashing’ or rather criticising bad writing, not writing on difficult issues. It’s simply not the case that all writing on difficult issues is bad – to put it mildly – and nor is it the case that all bad writing is on difficult issues. In fact that’s one of the points I’m making: that one of the reasons bad writing is so harmful is because it uses the badness of the writing to masquerade as writing about difficult issues. That’s a complaint that a great many people made about Hegel, from his own day (Schopenhauer is downright rude on the subject) to the present; that is one thing that bad writing of a certain kind can do.
Another correspondent says something more interesting – finally, a break from the ‘It’s difficult/You’re bashing theory’ defense.
Yes there is a large amount of very poor academic writing. And there are huge mounds of garbage journalism, vast piles of terrible prose fiction, and untold heaps of lousy poetry. Perhaps academics should know better, but so should journalists and authors of all stripes. You’ll pardon me if this seems to be (warning, potential academic term coming up) ideologically driven. Allan Bloom’s prose was often turgid, and such cultural “critics” as Bill Bennett fill their work with cliches and non sequiturs, yet somehow or other they never make the lists in these parlour games. Feminists and post-colonialists, however–well, it’s open season. Must just be a coincidence.
No, it’s not a coincidence. We say explicitly in ‘About B&W’ that our target is FN on the left. Why? Because we’re on the left, that’s why, and think it should be self-critical and self-correcting. I’m emphatically a feminist, for example (as is my colleague), and that’s exactly why I don’t want feminism to be mixed up with either woolly notions about different ways of knowing or with turgid empty ‘theoretical’ droning. What’s so odd about that? Nothing, surely. Wouldn’t it be nice to see more people on the right objecting to, for instance, the bullying manners of Bill O’Reilly, or the anti-intellectualism of Bush? Wouldn’t we respect the right more if there were more of that kind of thing? I know I would. So maybe it follows that others will respect the left more if leftists speak up when they think a given branch of leftism has got things wrong.
In response to one of your correspondents: Allan Bloom’s prose was in fact NOT turgid – it was spectacularly good. I presume your correspondent felt able to say this because he/she wouldn’t think of actually reading Closing of the American Mind. It’s a beautifully written book, whatever you think of its argument, and its magnificent writing is clearly one of the reasons it was a best-seller. D’oes your correspondent think Saul Bellow’s writing stinks too? Probably he does – not that he’s read him – because Bellow’s a cultural conservative too. But for what it’s worth, Bellow’s endorsement of Bloom’s book was about style as well as content — a first-rate writer knows another one when he sees him. I’m sick of turgid academic writers writing off the values of good writing – and I very much appreciated your own strong take on bad academic writing, by the way. Thanks.
Thanks back, Vivian.
“I’m sick of turgid academic writers writing off the values of good writing”
You and me both. A favorite quote of mine is via an article by William Kerrigan in Lingua Franca several years ago – I’ve quoted it before but not lately. A theoretically-inclined English professor liked to start her graduate Shakespeare seminar with the stern injunction, ‘Do not fetishize the language.’ Uh…right.
O,
i would appreciate an explanation of this line, “In a way I hesitate to make this criticism, because the writer of this letter also wrote a good one on another issue.”
Now, i happen to think you write some very provocative and insightful pieces here. However, i would not hesitate to call you on a brick if you write one. In addition, i would be truly grateful if you would point out any flaws in my thinking should you come across them. In fact i would feel a bit cheated if you did not. Especially if you withheld critique because you thought i had made one or two good points in the past.
greg
Well, but my comments on the letters have been a tad sharp, or at least mocking – because the letters in question were not so much reasoned disagreement as expostulation. But the correspondent in question did better than that. At least, I think that’s what I meant…
I don’t know what this English professor meant by ‘fetishizing’ the language.
What I mean by it is regarding language as an entity that exists outside its users; or a precious thing that we need to protect and respect. I’m critical of this kind of language fetishism because it leads people to adopt a rigid, fundamentalist attitude towards language use, and to follow all kinds of silly grammar rules out of superstition. Shakespeare certainly didn’t fetishise the English language in this sense.
In my vocabulary, valuing good writing and fetishising language are two different things.
GB,
Yes, it was clear in the context of Kerrigan’s article that what this particular professor meant by ‘do not fetishize the language’ was: Do not be so stunned and amazed by Shakespeare’s brilliance with language that you neglect to read him with enough suspicion, hostility, disdain, and stupidity. So in her vocabulary, valuing good writing and fetishzing language are indeed not two different things but the same thing, which is exactly what’s wrong with that kind of thinking. Don’t read Shakespeare as a literary writer, oh no, that won’t do, that’s so yesterday, no, read him as someone whose opinions on raceclassandgender need to be problematized.
I’ve read whole books in which people do this, and it’s so depressing, I can’t tell you.