Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena

by Jonathan D. Culler (Editor), Kevin Lamb, Marc D. Redfield

Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them. In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic

240 pages, Hardcover

First published June 25, 2003

About the author

Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America in 1976 for an outstanding book of criticism. Structuralist Poetics was one of the first introductions to the French structuralist movement available in English.

Culler’s contribution to the Very Short Introductions series, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, received praise for its innovative technique of organization. Instead of chapters to schools and their methods, the book's eight chapters address issues and problems of literary theory.

In The Literary in Theory (2007) Culler discusses the notion of Theory and literary history’s role in the larger realm of literary and cultural theory. He defines Theory as an interdisciplinary body of work including structuralist linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Reviews

[Marianne Janack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good discussion of the issues about difficulty and "opacity" in academic writing, taking up Martha Nussbaum's criticism of Judith Butler's writing style. There are several really excellent essays, and I recommend this to anyone who has either thought, with frustration, that academic writing is overly difficult, or has wondered about academic writing styles.

[Birch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super fun!!!