Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> Not long back I read at the beginning of a paper the following,
>
> "While the grotesque body of Bakhtin's theory has been taken up in
> feminist discourse on both camp and the abject, particular political
> and potentially feminist dimensions of the grotesque body as a site of
> communal transformation and liberation have yet to be elucidated." [CLIP]
>
> I could come up with hundreds of such quotes. I contend that such
> quotes do not indicate bad writing or good writing but simply that
> "jargon" is more valuable to the writer than clear writing. Will you
> address this, please?
Jerry, I think that without intending to, you cheated. The web version (which I just consulted) doesn't show this, but it seems that that first paragraph, from which you quote one sentence, is NOT part of the paper but is rather an abstract. So we are back to my 100+ genres and their differing demands. That abstract does _very_ well what an abstract should do: it let's other professionals decide whether they want to read the article, a decision to be made partly on the basis of the critical traditions the article links to. The _actual_ first paragraph is as follows:
Writing in the early twentieth century, Mikhail Bakhtin authored Rabelais and His World, a work of literary criticism that not only expounded on Francois Rabelais, but also serves as a treatise on folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Central to both these projects is the carnival, a ritual time where all ranks and rules of life are dissolved in contradiction, excess, and laughter. For Bakhtin, the carnival is a profoundly liberating space, one that is irresistible and life-giving. In "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" Donna Haraway creates the myth of the "ironic" and "blasphemous" (Haraway 149) cyborg, a creature that is both human and machine, a being who embraces partial perspectives, lived contradiction, and kinship with machines and animals (Haraway 154). The cyborg expresses disenchantment with grand narratives, unity, and the dualisms that ensue under such a mandate. For Haraway, the cyborg is to express socialist-feminism without damning technology or machine skill, a trend that she worried was entirely too prevalent in feminist praxis. The cyborg is also conceived as a monster who challenges gender and other "natural" categories. In Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua creates a mythopoetic and personal history of colonialism and endurance in the Southeastern region of the United States. Merging poetry and prose, English and Spanish, Anzaldua details her struggle to lay claim to all parts of herself, against cultural demands for oppressive (and often racist, sexist, or homophobic) unity. The metaphor of the Borderlands has been influential in post-colonial and critical theory, shifting discourse away from "the margins" as the place where difference is exiled, to thinking about difference as the place "physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (Anzaldua 19), that is, as a site of conflict, encounter, and potential transformation. ------------------
That is wonderful. In the abstract Sherman _must_ keep to a word limit and, within that word limit, give the gist of an essay of 10, 666 words. I think it is a gem as abstracts go. [REMEMBER GENRE; REMEMBER GENRE; REMEMBER GENRE] (Incidentally, every sentence constitutes a genre, and the same article may contain scores of "sub-genres," each of which has its own demands on the writer.) Saying (or at least pointing to) so much in so few words cannot be done without resorting to professional jargon -- and that jargon is not only legitimate there, by using it he says something that could not be said (within the word limits) in any other way. In the sentence in isolation, as you quote it, "the grotesque body of Bakhtin's theory" is indeed a verbal monstrosity, utterly unintelligible. But it is not supposed to be intelligible (by itself) to anyone who has not read not only Bakhtin but a good deal of scholarly work making use of Bakhtin. In other words, given its genre, the sentence is a model of clarity and precision.
This does not respond to your whole post, and none of my posts have yet responded to more than fragments of your posts. I'll try to do better in future posts, as well as develop further the points made here and relate them to the overall topic.
Carrol