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Date: | Wed, 21 Apr 1999 13:52:52 -0700 |
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On Wed, 21 Apr 1999 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> In a message dated 4/21/99 2:48:30 PM Central Daylight Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> It may be making a comeback. I was talking to a grad student a few
> weeks ago and we got on the subject of some crank award given for the worst
> academic prose. It went to an anthropologist, and my friend said he really
> admires this author's work. I commented that it was too bad that the
> author's apparently good ideas were hidden in jargon and convuluted prose.
> He claims that this is by intent, that there is something of a scholarly
> trend in which authors are now consciously choosing to write densely in order
> to make the reader pay more attention or something like that.
The "dense" prose utilized by authors such as Foucault, is not intended by
any means to "make the reader pay more attention" by any means. To
attempt to do so would be equivalent to garaunteeing that no-one reads the
work. Rather, the intent is to express ideas that are not readily
explained in the current and equally jargonistic language of
anthropological thought.
New ideas require new terminology, especially when the old terminology is
laden with a colonialist rhetoric that anthropology is attempting to
avoid. There is something more to the idea that the prose is
intentionally difficult, however, and that is that accepting the fact that
language
constructs our perceptions of the world around us, unfamiliar language
forces us to perceive that world in unfamiliar ways. This is not
intented to force one to pay attention, but merely to engage that world in
new light. Pass the guinness.....
J. Cameron Monroe
I just looked
> at him funny and ordered another Guinness.
> I'll split infinitives if I want to,
> Larry
>
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