Criticism of Academic Prose
As editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Dutton ran the Bad Writing Contest, which aimed to "expose 'pretentious, swaggering gibberish' passed off as scholarship at leading universities". In 1995, the contest was won by Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson. In 1998, the contest awarded first place to University of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a sentence which appeared in the journal diacritics. Butler defended her work against the charges of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of the New York Times. Dutton then ended the contest.
The Bad Writing Contest emerged in an intellectual climate dominated by fallout from the Sokal affair, in which the alleged opaqueness and obscurity of postmodern writing came in for criticism: Edward Said, for instance, deplored "diminishment and incoherence" in the writings of some of his colleagues and Martha Nussbaum condemned academic writing that was "ponderous and obscure".
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