Equal, That Is, to the Field Itself: Stylistic Mimesis in Critical Writing

The phrasing in the singular of this forum's key query—Why do I have to write like that?—allows it to be read either as a rhetorical or non-rhetorical question. As a rhetorical question, it might be rephrased resistantly, in teenager-speak, as "And I have to do this why?" Non-rhetorically, it asks "Why do I have to do this?" and raises the issue of disciplinary compunctions. Of course, the two meanings are not entirely separable. But this brief reflection will pursue the second route.

Criticisms of the "baleful" language of theoretical inquiry are not new, so it is worth recalling at the outset that we were once exhorted, both directly and by example, to cultivate this "theoretical style." Those who attended ACCUTE in the 1980s, and meetings of its lively Theory Group in particular, will recall the chain of reasoning: "natural" or "commonsensical" language use (whether in critical writing or, for example, the Victorian realist novel) laid claims to linguistic transparency and thus occluded the traces of its own (power/knowledge) operations. I particularly recall a memorable phrase in circulation at the time and even today: "the tyranny of lucidity." Even without explicit encouragement in this direction, aspiring critics were offered ample precedent in the writings of some key European theorists (who were sometimes the victims of clunky and not always idiomatic translation, a factor not entirely incidental to this tale). The bold generic blendings, syntactic experimentations, neologisms, and elliptical formulations of Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray, and Lacan, for example, were read as signaling a new theoretical style, one true to the gaps, erasures, deferrals, rhythms, connections, and complexities of the signifying systems these authors sought to understand. As a result, we remain expectant of, if perhaps now less tolerant of, stylistic density and complexity in theoretical writing.

But is also important to remember that complaints about (what we might call) theoretical overwriting predate the advent of "theory" to the North American academy by some fifty to seventy years. Janice Radway notes that by the 1920s and 1930s, a set of highly specialized academic discourses and practices had arisen to challenge the older generalist or "liberal arts" educational model.¹ This was the result of three factors, all occurring more or less simultaneously from the period 1870 to 1915: in the United States, the rapid growth of dedicated research universities developed on the German model; the more general "professionalization" of academia leading to "guild" and bureaucratic discourses; and—this is Radway's primary interest—the rapid proliferation and thus stratification of print, particularly periodical production, which permitted the rise of specialized academic publications but also allowed a broader range of cultural commentators (the dreaded "middlebrow") to position themselves publicly and horn in on the academic's traditional turf. Thus the new specialist style was designed not only to meet new knowledge demands but to strengthen demarcations of expertise. I would wish to add a further element, however, which is evidenced by the fact that the new "specialist style" involved more than the deployment of technical terms or "jargon." In addition, it was marked—as its detractors never ceased to complain—by a discursive densification perceived as obscurantist or hermetic. At work is a sort of seepage: new paradigms, and new demands for analytical complexity, create a greater sense of phenomenological complexity (note the tail wagging the dog), whose description demands a style more complex in its turn.

Of course, critics always have matched the medium to the message: consider Matthew Arnold's "Attic" style, or, even earlier, Pope's "Essay on Criticism" in which the well-known lines of "representative verse" function as a synecdoche for the larger project. We could follow this escalator back to classical times, with critics modelling the ways they think writing ought to be: weighty, or witty, or decorous. The idea that style should reflect, or be appropriate to, both subject matter and occasion is a cornerstone rhetorical precept. Arguably, however, something different is happening in the period Radway describes, which may best be illustrated, in the literary realm, by I...