Just Being Difficult?

Jonathan Culler is Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Kevin Lamb is a graduate student in the English Department at Cornell University.

• 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

"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