{"product_id":"just-being-difficult-9780804747103","title":"Just Being Difficult","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIs 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. \u003ci\u003eJust Being Difficult?\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction: 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","brand":"Stanford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49405554327895,"sku":"9780804747103","price":19.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780804747103.jpg?v=1730492811","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/just-being-difficult-9780804747103","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}