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Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena
Contributor(s): Culler, Jonathan (Author), Lamb, Kevin (Author)
ISBN: 0804747105     ISBN-13: 9780804747103
Publisher: Stanford University Press
OUR PRICE:   $26.60  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: July 2003
Qty:
Annotation: "This collection is a remarkable and rational contribution to a passionate contemporary debate. Is academic writing unjustifiably obscure? The claim has been widely made in media ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The New Republic and Philosophy and Literature. Just Being Difficult? offers a thoughtful, generally unpolemical, stimulating, and learned series of analyses of the claim, of those its targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended public and the audiences beyond it." --Richard Terdiman, University of California, Santa Cruz
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
Dewey: 808.02
LCCN: 2002014744
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present
Physical Information: 0.62" H x 6" W x 9.14" (0.76 lbs) 240 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

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.