Wednesday, January 2, 2013

And the winner is ...


The winner is Judith Butler, literary theorist, who in 1998 took first place in the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature for the following ninety-four-word sentence:
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.
--From Jennifer Howard, "Missing Ears," The Times Literary Supplement (December 21 and 28, 2012), p. 29

1 comment:

Gary Rawnsley said...

My students are always impressed by this kind of writing. They think it is "academic" and therefore something to which they should aspire. I ask them, 'do you understand it?' They reply, 'no, but it sounds good.' So what's the point? I advise my students to strive for clarity and precision. Never use seven words when one will do; think about punctuation; and never make up words (which seems to be a trend in the critical theory-type fields). To be honest, I hate this kind of writing.