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Academic Language, or why they done got to talk all fancy-like
Evil Multifarious
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am going to do something unfair; I am going to transcribe a chunk of an academic essay that I recently dealt with as one of the central secondary sources for an essay of my own. This is written by a fellow named John Guillory, about Cleanth Brooks and the way he establishes and treats the formation of a new canon of high literature. Brooks is a large figure in literary criticism with regard to T. S. Eliot, author of The Waste Land, one of the most important modernist poems.
Doing this is unfair because it removes the paragraph from the context which might illuminate it, but even so, humour me, I beg you:
This isn't even really that bad. The difficulty in parsing this nonsense lies in two main areas: defining terms, and occasionally clumsy sentence structure. In most every sentence, a major part of the sentence - subject, object, or predicate (verb) - requires definition with reference to either a previous part of Guillory's essay or an external theoretical source. To understand the sentence, then, you must move away from the sentence and fix those definitions in your mind before returning. Let's look at an individual example:
"Formalist interpretation" isn't too bad - it is interpretation of a piece of literature through analysis of form. However, this is easily confused with the more common meaning of formal. Knowing this term requires at least cursory knowledge of literary theory.
The verb, "subtends," is unusual, and I had to look it up even now. It's a pretty complicated concept for a single word - to subtend is to delimit something, to define its boundaries, while also being its opposite in some cases. Not the clearest verb.
The "larger ideology" is defined earlier in the essay, but not very explicitly. I can't even really tell you what that ideology is, and I read the article four times before writing a 15 page essay about it that received an A.
"Domain of practice" is part of an adverb phrase that modifies "satisfying," which is a structural element of the sentence that delays the appearance of the object. This kind of delay does not help comprehension. It serves various purposes, but the easy conveyance of ideas is not one of them. Here he seems to mean the domain of the practice of literary criticism.
"Longing for consensus" is again referring to previous ideas in the essay, but this is the first time "consensus" seems to have been used to bring up these ideas. Guillory is referring to consensus amongst critics and academics about which works of literature should be present in a canon of literature, and the desire to have that consensus because the superiority or importance of those works is somehow self-evident.
"For a metaphysics of the same" is a phrase in apposition, I believe the term is; it is another prepositional phrase to be attached to "longing." This is another complicated structural move that forces the reader to refer back to "longing," while also searching for what "the same" references. The fact that "metaphysics" here requires the reader to conceptualize a "metaphysics of consensus," a concept that is not defined or approached anywhere within the essay, is not helpful either.
My ultimate point here is that this single sentence requires a significant investment of effort and investigation to parse. A paragraph, or (god help me) a 26 page essay, requires a herculean effort to decipher.
Academic language requires that the reader be familiar with a great deal of terminology, for good reason: a single term can express a really big concept in a single word, and so it is much more efficient to use that word for that concept. Explaining a concept every time you want to make use of it is clumsy and inefficient. However, it seems to me that there is a tendency to use terms that are outside of established terminology. To reference "signs" and "signifiers" is perfectly fine; these are elements of structural linguistics, a very important theoretical system developed by Saussure, and you have to know them to read a lot of theory.
But critics and academics often create their own terms in the midst of their writing, or a series of terms arises implicitly in the body of academic writing in which they're involved. Using these terms means the reader has to do a lot of backtracking and referencing and just plain old thinking while trying to puzzle out the meaning of a sentence. In addition, academics in the liberal arts and social sciences love to write long, contorted sentences that are full of parenthetical clauses, appositional statements, dependent clauses, etc etc, so that it would be hard to figure out what they were saying even without the additional problem of terminology.
I don't have a problem with terminology, necessarily, although I think that a great deal of the time terminology is a crutch for academics. When you're dealing with continental philosophy that attempts to express ideas about how we have ideas, or about how we use language to express ideas, or how we think about the world, you're going to get some complicated language. That's fine. But in many cases, using the terminology can obscure a reader's understanding of the sentence, when a simpler term might have been suitable.
As a master's student in English literature who is focused on the Modern period, I still have plenty of trouble with tough theory readings. I know professors who have trouble with it. It is absurd. Some of the theory I have read is so dense with the terminology of an insular academic community that it has effectively cut itself out of a lot of academic discussion. This causes two major problems, in my opinion:
Anti -ntellectualism: People conceive of academics as locked in the ivory tower in a perpetual circle jerk. This is not far from the truth when it comes to dense theory. Even theory that deals with important ideas is often immediately rejected by intelligent readers because it is so incomprehensible. This only leads to an aggravation of an already existing concept of the academic as pretentious, useless to society, etc etc. This leads to the next problem:
Lack of dissemination of ideas: A lot of these ideas are important. I could give a fuck about Cleanth Brooks and his canon formation, but a lot of post-structural theory deals with how human beings conceive of reality, and the interaction between language and our ideas of reality, and what "ideas" are. These are really very important, and I think they can be of great benefit to people - as long as they are expressed in a way that isn't incomprehensible.
Alright, this turned out longer than I thought, but that's not a surprise, because I myself am turning into one of these long-winded, torturous academics, even as I protest against it.
Doing this is unfair because it removes the paragraph from the context which might illuminate it, but even so, humour me, I beg you:
Guillory wrote:The elaboration of the ideology into such allusive structures yields up the new criticism to the service of the liberal pluralism which is the regnant ideology of the academy and which the pedagogy in no way contradicts. The technique of formalist interpretation subtends the larger ideology, satisfying within a narrower domain of practice the longing for consensus, for a metaphysics of the same - a longing expressed by the posited "unity" of the literary work. But the intensity of the desire for unity is no longer news to us, since its frustration has been marked in recent years by the shattering of hermeneutic serenity and by the rise of a certain dogmatism, perplexingly inconsistent with the public aims of ideological pluralism. It would appear that we mean by consenses what Eliot meant by orthodoxy.
This isn't even really that bad. The difficulty in parsing this nonsense lies in two main areas: defining terms, and occasionally clumsy sentence structure. In most every sentence, a major part of the sentence - subject, object, or predicate (verb) - requires definition with reference to either a previous part of Guillory's essay or an external theoretical source. To understand the sentence, then, you must move away from the sentence and fix those definitions in your mind before returning. Let's look at an individual example:
The technique of formalist interpretation subtends the larger ideology, satisfying within a narrower domain of practice the longing for consensus, for a metaphysics of the same - a longing expressed by the posited "unity" of the literary work.
"Formalist interpretation" isn't too bad - it is interpretation of a piece of literature through analysis of form. However, this is easily confused with the more common meaning of formal. Knowing this term requires at least cursory knowledge of literary theory.
The verb, "subtends," is unusual, and I had to look it up even now. It's a pretty complicated concept for a single word - to subtend is to delimit something, to define its boundaries, while also being its opposite in some cases. Not the clearest verb.
The "larger ideology" is defined earlier in the essay, but not very explicitly. I can't even really tell you what that ideology is, and I read the article four times before writing a 15 page essay about it that received an A.
"Domain of practice" is part of an adverb phrase that modifies "satisfying," which is a structural element of the sentence that delays the appearance of the object. This kind of delay does not help comprehension. It serves various purposes, but the easy conveyance of ideas is not one of them. Here he seems to mean the domain of the practice of literary criticism.
"Longing for consensus" is again referring to previous ideas in the essay, but this is the first time "consensus" seems to have been used to bring up these ideas. Guillory is referring to consensus amongst critics and academics about which works of literature should be present in a canon of literature, and the desire to have that consensus because the superiority or importance of those works is somehow self-evident.
"For a metaphysics of the same" is a phrase in apposition, I believe the term is; it is another prepositional phrase to be attached to "longing." This is another complicated structural move that forces the reader to refer back to "longing," while also searching for what "the same" references. The fact that "metaphysics" here requires the reader to conceptualize a "metaphysics of consensus," a concept that is not defined or approached anywhere within the essay, is not helpful either.
My ultimate point here is that this single sentence requires a significant investment of effort and investigation to parse. A paragraph, or (god help me) a 26 page essay, requires a herculean effort to decipher.
Academic language requires that the reader be familiar with a great deal of terminology, for good reason: a single term can express a really big concept in a single word, and so it is much more efficient to use that word for that concept. Explaining a concept every time you want to make use of it is clumsy and inefficient. However, it seems to me that there is a tendency to use terms that are outside of established terminology. To reference "signs" and "signifiers" is perfectly fine; these are elements of structural linguistics, a very important theoretical system developed by Saussure, and you have to know them to read a lot of theory.
But critics and academics often create their own terms in the midst of their writing, or a series of terms arises implicitly in the body of academic writing in which they're involved. Using these terms means the reader has to do a lot of backtracking and referencing and just plain old thinking while trying to puzzle out the meaning of a sentence. In addition, academics in the liberal arts and social sciences love to write long, contorted sentences that are full of parenthetical clauses, appositional statements, dependent clauses, etc etc, so that it would be hard to figure out what they were saying even without the additional problem of terminology.
I don't have a problem with terminology, necessarily, although I think that a great deal of the time terminology is a crutch for academics. When you're dealing with continental philosophy that attempts to express ideas about how we have ideas, or about how we use language to express ideas, or how we think about the world, you're going to get some complicated language. That's fine. But in many cases, using the terminology can obscure a reader's understanding of the sentence, when a simpler term might have been suitable.
As a master's student in English literature who is focused on the Modern period, I still have plenty of trouble with tough theory readings. I know professors who have trouble with it. It is absurd. Some of the theory I have read is so dense with the terminology of an insular academic community that it has effectively cut itself out of a lot of academic discussion. This causes two major problems, in my opinion:
Anti -ntellectualism: People conceive of academics as locked in the ivory tower in a perpetual circle jerk. This is not far from the truth when it comes to dense theory. Even theory that deals with important ideas is often immediately rejected by intelligent readers because it is so incomprehensible. This only leads to an aggravation of an already existing concept of the academic as pretentious, useless to society, etc etc. This leads to the next problem:
Lack of dissemination of ideas: A lot of these ideas are important. I could give a fuck about Cleanth Brooks and his canon formation, but a lot of post-structural theory deals with how human beings conceive of reality, and the interaction between language and our ideas of reality, and what "ideas" are. These are really very important, and I think they can be of great benefit to people - as long as they are expressed in a way that isn't incomprehensible.
Alright, this turned out longer than I thought, but that's not a surprise, because I myself am turning into one of these long-winded, torturous academics, even as I protest against it.
Evil Multifarious on
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Obviously but it's gone really far. What use is education when only people with a masters degree in the subject can understand half the writing? You end up in a perpetual cycle of the only people learning about a subject are people dedicating their lives to it. So lots of ideas never get out of that very small cloistered group.
Jargon, while produced in the stupidest of manners (in isolation), is quite useful. Aside from keeping the ignorant from butting it, jargon is often used in place of a large, complex idea. If I can use seven letters in place of a paragraph, there is a win involved.
As for the bad sentence structure, academics are rather famous for not knowing how humans actually speak, barring linguists.
That said, a lot of this stems from the fact that people don't examine language much. People don't think about they say, and this is especially bad in English since we have so many origins for our words.
Hell, the fact that I understand root words and can figure words out without actually knowing the definition is much of what makes me an A student instead of a B student.
I will say, however, that academia is vastly flawed. The English department especially, since they so rarely actually PRODUCE anything of value to anyone off campus, whereas scientific jargon at least gets us inventions on occasion.
Hell, I had an English teacher, who is like one of the heads of the department now I think, say "Yes" when I asked them if I thought being literate makes you a better PERSON than everyone else.
And then they suggested I scalp basketball tickets.
I also had another prof who said that books were their only friends.
Some academics are academics because they don't like the rest of the world, so of course they develop secret languages to keep everyone else out.
The other thing is, it's just stylistics and discourse. You use different language in different contexts, which is why word choice can change greatly from every day speech to literary minded speech.
But yeah -- that's bad writing, why try to blame the whole English department for it?
And that is how I became everyones' favorite.
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Celery: The issue is that these are the people teaching other people how to write. Far too many academics are very inefficient with language. English or otherwise.
Only for you, and generally not for society. Being concise is a good thing, but too much and you aren't even in the realm of brevity anymore and it's the intellectual equivalent to text messaging.
It's even worse when you have cross specialist discussions and nobody is on the same page as what a certain word means. That's no way to communicate, and is the root of a lot of otherwise avoidable problems. It's less of an issue when it's purely theoretical bullshit amidst liberal arts departments, but when it arises in the more applicable areas it can cause a world of headaches.
If anything if esoteric terms are easily confused or incomprehensible wouldn't it be more practical to use the simplest language possible?
Very true.
Actually the very first thing that popped into my mind upon reading the OP was "Compare to your average conversation about WoW."
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Celery: Academics are not writing for people with standard vocabularies.
And why not? If you're a good writer, you should be able to craft something suitable for any audience. Even academics hate "academic" writing, so why not put something together your colleagues might actually enjoy reading?
Who's restricting this narcissitic jackassery to English departments? I could point to some 'scholarly' articles on Deconstructivist architecture that would make the OP's paragraph something you teach in kindergarten. And I still don't understand what the underlying philosophy of Decon is, aside from not wanting to let anybody know.
Because they can only achieve orgasm by using a mid 19th century phrase in a peer reviewed article.
End of thread.
It's not just Guillory I'm talking about; pick up any theory anthology and you'll see far worse writing than that. What I'm suggesting is that by and large, theoretical academic writing is quite often bad writing.
First of all, Guillory isn't at all post-structural
Secondly, nope
Very true. I use my writing mostly to talk government agencies into things. Also women.
Why do you think academics write?
What do you think Joe Trailerpark would think of a twenty page plain-English journal article on the homosexual undertones in the sperm oil scene in Moby-Dick?
First of all, ok then. But what is he?
Secondly, I was mainly referring to the above quote. While I don't doubt that post-structuralism and its ilk intend to deal with such things, I am yet to be convinced that A) it offers any such insights and
All of which could lead to C) Academic speak within certain fields is most likely the same as the cause of consultant speak. Banality needs to be disguised.
EDIT: while I was writing this a whole lot of posts came up with the same view, so my characterization of the argument here is no longer valid.
It's mostly, "Well, okay, what if you look at it this way, now To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about why Big Government is good!"
A rather immense amount of it is absolute bullshit and most of the rest is gossip about dead people.
Now, that said, it can be a good mental exercise, and it's possible to gain some insight from it, but it's mostly a sport.
What's this in response to? Any in particular? Just a general observation?
I think to Celery. I tend to just go on rants in these topics.
I may have been king of my classes but I did it by way of argument rather than agreement. :P
Eh, while this is true for the vast majority of English academics, every now and again you'll find someone that combines the history of the period, what was known about the author, and what was written and does their darnedest to try to extract the author's true meaning from the work instead of just pretentious wankery.
My English classes were absolutely filled with sex talk. Everyone was gay or bi and into BDSM apparently.
My teachers tended more to focus on their historically known political and social views.
Sounds like you may be getting the more exciting teachers.
Yeah, sorry, I was meaning to contrast canon formation and poststructuralism, not make it sound like they were the same.
This is somewhat off-topic, maybe, but I'm curious as to what you think post-structuralism actually is, since I've heard you poo-poo it before. At its root, post-structuralism asserts that the structuralist theory of language - words as signifiers that are arbitrarily linked to the ideas they signify - can be applied to all the ways we see reality. So, for example, to be very basic, the idea of a "chair" being assigned to a certain configuration of matter is just as arbitrary as the verbal sound "chair" being assigned to that idea. It's easy with physical stuff, but of course post-structuralism approaches abstract concepts similarly - the self, for example.
There is no reason for the author's intent to have any more value than any other reader's
Conservative area and heavy Middle Ages literary preferences. Lots of frustration+Victorian Lit? Hello.
Still, beats the hell out of Angry Minority Lit which is what I would have gotten at Monterey.
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Evil: Careful who you say that around, a lot of academics are fricking religious about which perspectives do and do not have value.