[lbo-talk] churchill: wow

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Sat May 20 23:31:01 PDT 2006


A friend, a prof at UCB, once wrote a crystal clear and excellent scholarly essay on Pound's Malatesta Cantos, commonly held to be an extremely difficult and obscure work. The Modern Language Association turned it down because it was "too clear."

There's a certain amount of completely unnecessary obscurity and obfuscation in academic work.

This is obscurity is partly enforced by the market: the more candidates there are for limited jobs, the more esoteric their skills must appear to be. Also, the more people have to be publish. This has resulted in an extraordinary amount of hackery.

Joanna

Gar Lipow wrote:


> On 5/20/06, info at pulpculture.org <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
>
>> [1] sounds weird, right? Gut instinct is to say, "Oh, the elitist
>> snobs!"
>> But that isn't really what's going on. It's that, in order to condense
>> complex scholarly work into a format that a trade publication will deal
>> with, you often have to eliminate all the little things academics do in
>> order to make it really really clear that their conclusions are
>> tentative,
>> that there is more work to be done, that other people objects and
>> this is
>> why, where you take on your critics in an analysis that, frankly, a
>> lot of
>> regular readers could give a shit about. Not b/c they are dumb, but
>> because
>> such material is _for_ those in the scholarly community who care
>> about the
>> generation of knowledge in that area of study.
>> Bitch | Lab
>> http://blog.pulpculture.org
>>
> Hmm. So if you are an academic, you lose points if you explain your
> work to a popular or non-academic professional audience. Ruddiman
> has a maverick view on global warming (not a denier; he thinks human
> climate modification goes back to the invention of fire. Most other
> climate scientists think he is most likely wrong, but consider it an
> interesting hypothesis that could be correct; in other words it is
> not the majority view, but not crackpot.) Knowing it would be of
> interest to public right now he has written and had published a
> popularization - basically he took an average lengith scientific
> paper, and wrote a book length explication for a popular audience.
> Does he lose points for that? What if he produced an 800 word
> simplification for E magazine?
>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list