Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 2003"

Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena

Abstract: Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down 1 JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB Part 1. In Search of a Common Language or, Language Debates and the History of Philosophy 1. Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars: A Historical Perspective 15 MARGARET FERGUSON 2. Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds 29 ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER 3. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 43 JONATHAN CULLER 4. The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning 58 JOHN MCCUMBER Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor 5. Feminism's Broken English 75 ROBYN WIEGMAN 6. The Resistance of Theory or, The Worth of Agony 95 REY CHOW 7. Styles of Intellectual Publics 106 MICHAEL WARNER Part 3. Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness 8. On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity 129 PETER BROOKS 9. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics 139 ROBERT KAUFMAN 1O. Bad Writing 157 BARBARA JOHNSON Part 4. Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment 11. The Morality of Form or,What's "Bad" about "BadWriting"? 171 DAVID PALUMBO-LIU 12. The Politics of the Production of Knowledge:An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 181 STUART J. MURRAY I3. Values of Difficulty 199 JUDITH BUTLER

Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson

Abstract: Benedict Anderson, professor at Cornell and specialist in Southeast Asian studies, is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). It is no understatement to say that this is one of the most influential books of the last twenty years. Widely read both by social scientists and humanists, it has become an unavoidable document. For people in the humanities, Anderson is particularly interesting because he explores the rise of nationalism in connection with the rise of the novel.

Imagining the Coherence of the English Major.

Abstract: I take as my point of departure a passage from that great work of structural poetics, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, of 1957: "Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science. A precisely similar train ing of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up" (10-11). "Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows . . ."?I have been speculating about exactly what sort of claim this is. Is it really a universal claim that anyone, anywhere, and at any time, who has ever studied literature seriously knows this? Or does "everyone" mean the serious student of literature who Frye imagines might read this work of literary theory? Or could the claim be, rather, a covert stipulation of "seri ously studied"? Anyone who has seriously studied literature knows this, so that if you don't know it, you have been insufficiently serious, merely dilet tantish, in your study of literature. At any rate, Frye, a serious man, dis plays great confidence that there is a group of those who have seriously studied literature who know that this study is coherent and progressive and who have a sense of the unity of the subject. Do we know this still? Neither the current offerings of English departments nor recent writ ings about literature provide much evidence that we do, but perhaps we do know this still, at some level; or perhaps we know it only as repressed or