Jargon

At long last, the tide seems to be turning against ugly, jargon-ridden criticism in the academy. Complaints about impenetrable, theoretically inspired gobbledygook have been heard for many years from public intellectuals writing in journals ranging from the New Criterion through the New Yorker; what is new is a wave of revulsion in the academy itself. Writing in The New York Times (27 February 1999), Dinitia Smith observes that attacks on bad writing, “replete with bloated jargon,” are now coming from all sides. Edward Said has begun his term as president of the MLA with a stinging attack on English departments for “fostering incomprehensible writing.” Smith notes that the bad writing competition regularly conducted by the journal Philosophy and Literature has gained the amused attention of an ever-increasing readership; recent prize-winners have included the philosopher turned queer-feminist cultural critic Judith Butler, darling of the American theory establishment. Also targeting Butler as a particularly egregious example, Susan Gubar and Martha Nussbaum have added their voices to the growing chorus of protest. Having made known her disgust at “the thick soup of [Butler’s] prose,” Nussbaum continues:

Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition . . . have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity . . . the thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma.

(New Republic, 22 February 1999)

General impatience with jargon is often coupled with disgust at the critical -isms whose adherents have spawned their own jargons while depreciating the literature they purport to study: to name only some, feminism, Marxism, deconstructionism, Freudianism, cultural materialism, new historicism. The employment of special jargons has abetted the special-interest politicization of criticism, to a point where literary studies resemble an endless Balkan war fought with high-tech weapons. Yet Harold Bloom’s recent Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is more than just an impassioned protest against this state of affairs; it promises to turn things around in Shakespeare studies at least. Bravo, Harold!

Jargon is both a cause and symptom of the transformation of literary criticism from a discipline in its own right, practiced by gracious writers, into an outlandish hybrid of philosophy, social science, psychology, anthropology, geography, and religion. Moreover, much of the now-fashionable critical jargon is borrowed from foreign languages and disciplines, rendering English critical prose opaque, ungraceful, and intimidatingly pretentious. Happily, however, the present moment seems more auspicious than any in recent times for a concerted effort to rid literary study of all encumbering jargon. Both books and the pleasure of reading await rediscovery after having been lost, for so many years, to so many potential readers.

Let us start the general decontamination by first assembling some of the most pernicious foreign jargon for disposal. Having done that, let us then identify some of the primary sources of critical pollution. Rebarbative terms often encountered in criticism include simile, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, chiasmus, catachresis, bathos, pathos, hyperbole, hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe, allegory, symbol. Why, as George Orwell asked long ago, must we import Greek and Latin terms when plain English ones will do? Why have we failed to adopt the English poetic terms coined in the same spirit by George Puttenham as long ago as 1589? ¹ But wait, it gets worse: ellipsis, zeugma, metalepsis, apostrophe, hyperbaton, hysteron proteron, onomatopoeia, asyndeton, paronomasia, epithet, litotes, meiosis, anaphora, antistrophe, aporia, prosopopeia. And more outlandish still: clinamen, tessera, apophrades, simploche, antanaclasis, exargasia, cacosyntheton, hypotiposis, epidiastole. So much, you might think, for the “art of poetry,” but there’s always another layer of jargon waiting to be peeled away: caesura, pentameter, heptameter, iamb, dactyl, spondee, trochee, distich, hemistich, stanza, sestina, canzone, sonnet, epigraph, epigram, eclogue, elegy, tragedy, comedy. How is the common English reader served by any of this pretentious verbiage—why not just say, for example, “sad play” or “happy play”? How is the poet Spenser served when his intrusive contemporary E.K., a proto-theorist if ever there was one, responds thus to a line in his “January” eclogue: “A pretty epanorthosis . . . withal a paronomasia?” Or when E.K. refers to a figure of speech in “February” as: “a certain Icon or...