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The following message may be freely posted on the Internet.
Philosophy and Literature announces
Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998)
Full text at:
http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily
We are pleased to announce winners of the fourth Bad Writing Contest,
sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature.
The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable
passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last
few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, departmental memos, etc. are
not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from
serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody
cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so
widespread.
Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S.
are among those who wrote winning entries in the latest contest.
Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric
and comparative literature at the University of California at
Berkeley, admired as perhaps "one of the ten smartest people on the
planet," wrote the sentence that captured the contest's first prize.
Homi K. Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of
postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.
"As usual," commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and
Literature, "this year's winners were produced by well-known,
highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like
this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated
by the fact that the winning entries were all published by
distinguished presses and academic journals."
Professor Butler's first-prize sentence appears in "Further
Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time," an article in the
scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility
of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up
with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of
power.
Dutton remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of
such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon
University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten
smartest people on the planet'."
This year's second prize went to a sentence authored by Homi K.
Bhabha, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. He writes
in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of
discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification,
pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and
classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize"
formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the
rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters of the
University of Iowa, who describes it as "quite splendid: enunciatory
modality, indeed!"
Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol in the U.K.,
supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled
Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" (Princeton University Press, 1996):
As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined,
the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in
Manet's work of "les noms du p re," a Lacanian romance of the errant
paternal phallus ("Les Non-dupes errent"), a revised Freudian novella
of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence
enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of
insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and
child.
Stewart Unwin of the National Library of Australia passed along this
gem from the Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997).
The author is Timothy W. Luke, and the article is entitled, "Museum
Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural
History":
Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one
decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only
ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into
public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead
fossils as chronicles of life's everlasting quest for survival, and
canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living
collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and
non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such
necroliths in the museum's observational/expositional performances.
The passage goes on to explain that museum fossils and artifacts are
"strange superconductive conduits, carrying the vital elan of
contemporary biopower." It's demonstrated with helpful quotations from
Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.
Finally, a tour de force from a 1996 book published by the State
University of New York Press. It was located by M.J. Devaney, an
editor at the University of Nebraska Press. The author is D.G. Leahy,
writing in Foundation: Matter the Body Itself.
Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior
absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to
univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of
the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the
reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the
self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of
the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of
identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while
identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the
limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the
absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute
outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally
predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally
predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally
predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally
predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The
precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the
other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum
transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely
unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the
absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new
creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself
univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself
equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in "self-alienation,"
not "self-identity, itself in self-alienation" "released" in and by
"otherness," and "actual other," "itself," not the abysmal inversion
of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute
identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally
predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the
other-self-covering of identity which is the identification
person-self).
Dr. Devaney calls this book "absolutely, unequivocally
incomprehensible." While she has supplied further extended quotations
to prove her point, this seems to be enough.
forwarded
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The next round of the Bad Writing Contest, results to be announced at
the end of 1999, is now open. There is an endless ocean of
pretentious, turgid academic prose being added to daily, and we'll
continue to honor it.
Prof. Denis Dutton
Editor, Philosophy and Literature
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone: 011-643-348-7928
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The next round of the Bad Writing Contest, results to be announced at
the end of 1999, is now open. There is an endless ocean of
pretentious, turgid academic prose being added to daily, and we'll
continue to honor it.
Prof. Denis Dutton
Editor, Philosophy and Literature
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone: 011-643-348-7928
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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1. Take the 60-day No Aspartame Test and send us your case history.
Mission Possible International
5950-H State Bridge Rd. #215 Duluth, GA 30097 USA
2. Tell your doctor and all of your friends!
3. Return Asparcidal food to the store.
(anything with Monsanto's NutraSweet/Equal/Spoonful/Benevia/NatraTaste)
VISIT http://www.dorway.com Get links to over 30 sites on aspartame
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