or, "WHY CULTURAL THEORY SOMETIMES SUCKS"

OK, now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Like most students I get pretty sick of having to wade through the unintelligible crap that sometimes passes for academic writing. This perhaps explains why the inspiration (or at least one inspiration) for this site came from an article I read in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, dated June 22, 1997. The article, "When the Write Stuff Goes Wrong," reported on the results of the third annual Bad Writing contest, which searches the English-speaking world for examples of particularly dense academic writing. Unfortunately, some of the worst examples come from works in cultural and critical theory. The following are some of the winning entries.

This is my favorite: It's from Rob Wilson, a professor at the University of Hawaii. In his book, The Administration of Ethics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere, he writes:

"If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate the need to be decoded as the 'now-all-but-unreadable DNA' of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through the violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner-city."

If anyone else can figure out what the hell Prof. Wilson is talking about, they're a better person than I. Anyway, maybe you'd like to see the other prize-winning entries.

 

~ c o n t i n u e ~

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