In my downtime at work, I’ve been reading some amusing material about bad academic writing, my arch-nemesis while at university and, it appears, something of a sub-genre of humour on teh web. The primus inter pares of this genre is undoubtedly Postmodern Pooh by literary critic Frederick Crews, a riotous satire of the state of contemporary academic literary criticism. In eleven sham essays, Crews applies every major academic fashion of the past few decades — from postcolonial studies and chaos theory to queer theory, trauma studies and New Historicism — to A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, with predictably hilarious results. Take the following from a self-described ‘negotiationist’ (?) Pooh scholar:

We have shown that works such as Pooh don’t drift towards a banal meaninglessness; they become active historical players in their own right, shaping the public’s illusions about the important issues of the day, such as conquistadorial predation, witch trials, ius primae noctis, and the castration of preadolescent countertenors. The immediate issue here is whether the Pooh animals realise they constitute a de facto nudist colony.

Or:

If the ravages of imperialism are ever to end — if the colonising Heffalump one day lies down with the formerly colonised lamb — history may record that the first tremor of productive change was felt here, today, as we dear friends and scholars recontextualised a mere space of interrogation as a veritable site of intervention and, dare I say it, of contestation as well.

Then there’s Denis Dutton’s annual Bad Writing Contest, which in 1998 unearthed the following bilge from The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha, a professor of English at the University of Chicago:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

Ah yes, I remember encountering Bhabha in some of my compulsory historical theory courses, droning on about ‘fixity’ and clouding the transparent empiricism of real historical analysis with his quasi-literary squid’s ink. It’s not hard to imagine whole tomes of Bhabha being spat straight from Andrew C. Bulhak’s Postmodernism Generator, which is to clear thinking what Snoop Dogg’s now-defunct Shizzolator was to, well, everythang on th’ net, know what I’m sayin’?:

The primary theme of Hubbard’s analysis of textual capitalism is a self-referential paradox. It could be said that cultural discourse implies that art is used to reinforce outdated, colonialist perceptions of sexual identity.

More amusing than the above — which is plausible enough to past muster in first-year Art History — is the weak justification for this mental debility offered by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin in their Critical Terms for Literary Study. I remember similar arguments being dredged up by tutors to justify the inclusion of incomprehensible texts in subject reading packs:

Theory sets out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully — say those of Lacan or Kristeva — that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer.

It’s no wonder PhD enrolments in English literature are going into a nosedive. As blogger Danny Yee observes, many of these extracts are ‘constructions of dubious stability… built on highly questionable theoretical foundations’. But if the ideas of these authors have any objective value — which I’m sure some do — why coddle them in shrouds of jargon, irony and impenetrable syntax?