Pomo-babble

[Theophylact]

In the National Post (Canada): an amusing piece on bad writing by the Humanities professoriat.

Scholars in the humanities spend much of their time writing, and are forced constantly to read the work of superb writers. Yet they pour out streams of gnarled and barbarous sentences and don't even know they are doing it. Professors in English departments, after lives spent close to the best literature, usually produce the worst prose.

[ArcticFox]

LOL

The best pomo-babble requires a high level of jargon density. One word or two won't get you there. You need four key words in any major sentence. In pomo-babble it's appropriate to praise, for instance, a transgressive challenge to the valorization of hegemonic narrativity.

Now I can see why I never understood my university professors' marking. Professional and purposeful obfuscation.

Cheers
Mick

[ShawnD1]

Everybody thought I was nuts when I said this myself.

Mass culture now attracts the most bizarre theorizing. When moviemakers changed James Bond's brand of vodka, Aaron Jaffe of the University of Louisville wrote that this "carries a metaphorical chain of deterritorialized signifiers, repackaged up and down a paradigmatic axis of associations."

Here's one I couldn't quite grasp myself.

Empire collects all possible criticisms of free trade and wraps them in prose like this: "In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate."

wtf does that even mean?