Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Embracing Obfuscation
Every Thursday, the history department here at Old Ivy holds a seminar where professors from outside the university come in to present a paper. The affair is open to the general public, but typically only graduate students and faculty attend. Furthermore, the majority of graduate students who attend are first year students like myself who have been informed from on high that it is our duty to go to as many events as possible since we don't have any pesky dissertations to write yet and need to learn more about who's who on the faculty.
These are both compelling arguments, and when the well-catered reception they have after the talk is added into the equation, there's almost no reason a first year grad student shouldn't attend. However, if you were to press me to suggest one possible counterargument it would be this: the papers often assume (or seem to assume) a level of intellectual depth that some might find daunting. These are academics after all. To most people, language is a tool for communication. For academics, I am quickly learning, language is deployed to impress people with how much one knows without actually revealing any true information.
To demonstrate what I mean, consider the following list of paper titles. Five of them are actual papers that have been presented at the weekly history seminar. See if you can figure out which ones are real:
1. Reassessing Social Realism: Precultural Discourse and Postpatriarchial Nationalism
2. Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The Gulag Memoirs of a Japanese Humanist
3. Preconceptual Appropriation and Postdialectic Nihilism
4. The Most Expensive Form of Illness: Terrorism in Late Colonial Malaya
5. The Discourse of Economy: Subdialectic Cultural Theory in the Works of Fellini
6. The Breath of the Possible: Utopianism and the Street in Twentieth-Century Urbanism
7. The Meaninglessness of Discourse: Nationalism, Derridaist reading and Precultural Dialectic Theory
8. Zwischeneuropa: The Search for Modernity between Paris and Petersburg
9. The Fatal Flaw of Context: The Semioticist Paradigm of Expression and Constructivist Subtextual Theory
10. Atoms for Peace and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity
All set? No going back to change your answers after this point.
Ok. Here's the deal. The even numbered papers are real. The odd numbered paper titles were generated using The Postmodernism Generator. If I wanted to be more helpful, I could have noted that the theme of this year's center (and hence the supposed theme of the real papers) is Utopia and Dystopia. In spite of this however, there are some cases, which category the paper falls into remains difficult to determine from the title, and even after reading it can remain unclear.
Fun and games aside however, there is a serious point to this exercise, namely whether or not such linguistic gymnastics are necessary if one wishes to be considered a serious scholar. I have always been taught to eschew obfuscation in my writing, to set out arguments in a fashion that is intelligible and therefore interesting to the reader. The papers above however, along with many of the journal articles I have read during the course of the semester suggest that clarity in writing may no longer be a necessary prerequisite to academic success, and I find that disheartening. Maybe this is just the last shreds of my naive impressions of what scholarship should be getting ripped away by the harsh wind of academic reality. Maybe I'll come to accept these semantic contortions with good humor and aplomb as I get further initiated into the mysteries of the Ivory Tower. Current research suggests that there is no easy escape from this literary labyrinth. So maybe it's time for me to embrace the madness and claim it as my own.
After all, you know what they say: Upon arrival in the largest population concentration in the Lazio region of Italy, one should comport one's self in the manner of that metropole's inhabitants.
Every Thursday, the history department here at Old Ivy holds a seminar where professors from outside the university come in to present a paper. The affair is open to the general public, but typically only graduate students and faculty attend. Furthermore, the majority of graduate students who attend are first year students like myself who have been informed from on high that it is our duty to go to as many events as possible since we don't have any pesky dissertations to write yet and need to learn more about who's who on the faculty.
These are both compelling arguments, and when the well-catered reception they have after the talk is added into the equation, there's almost no reason a first year grad student shouldn't attend. However, if you were to press me to suggest one possible counterargument it would be this: the papers often assume (or seem to assume) a level of intellectual depth that some might find daunting. These are academics after all. To most people, language is a tool for communication. For academics, I am quickly learning, language is deployed to impress people with how much one knows without actually revealing any true information.
To demonstrate what I mean, consider the following list of paper titles. Five of them are actual papers that have been presented at the weekly history seminar. See if you can figure out which ones are real:
1. Reassessing Social Realism: Precultural Discourse and Postpatriarchial Nationalism
2. Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The Gulag Memoirs of a Japanese Humanist
3. Preconceptual Appropriation and Postdialectic Nihilism
4. The Most Expensive Form of Illness: Terrorism in Late Colonial Malaya
5. The Discourse of Economy: Subdialectic Cultural Theory in the Works of Fellini
6. The Breath of the Possible: Utopianism and the Street in Twentieth-Century Urbanism
7. The Meaninglessness of Discourse: Nationalism, Derridaist reading and Precultural Dialectic Theory
8. Zwischeneuropa: The Search for Modernity between Paris and Petersburg
9. The Fatal Flaw of Context: The Semioticist Paradigm of Expression and Constructivist Subtextual Theory
10. Atoms for Peace and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity
All set? No going back to change your answers after this point.
Ok. Here's the deal. The even numbered papers are real. The odd numbered paper titles were generated using The Postmodernism Generator. If I wanted to be more helpful, I could have noted that the theme of this year's center (and hence the supposed theme of the real papers) is Utopia and Dystopia. In spite of this however, there are some cases, which category the paper falls into remains difficult to determine from the title, and even after reading it can remain unclear.
Fun and games aside however, there is a serious point to this exercise, namely whether or not such linguistic gymnastics are necessary if one wishes to be considered a serious scholar. I have always been taught to eschew obfuscation in my writing, to set out arguments in a fashion that is intelligible and therefore interesting to the reader. The papers above however, along with many of the journal articles I have read during the course of the semester suggest that clarity in writing may no longer be a necessary prerequisite to academic success, and I find that disheartening. Maybe this is just the last shreds of my naive impressions of what scholarship should be getting ripped away by the harsh wind of academic reality. Maybe I'll come to accept these semantic contortions with good humor and aplomb as I get further initiated into the mysteries of the Ivory Tower. Current research suggests that there is no easy escape from this literary labyrinth. So maybe it's time for me to embrace the madness and claim it as my own.
After all, you know what they say: Upon arrival in the largest population concentration in the Lazio region of Italy, one should comport one's self in the manner of that metropole's inhabitants.
