The Undergarments of Style and My Secret Life of (Self)Censorship

Now don't be getting "your knickers in a twist," unless they are academic knickers of an engulfing propriety far beyond the habits of Bridget Jones or the demands of a Victorian school trustee. It is "perfectly all right" for a colloquial expression of private discomfort to appear in a Readers' Forum in an academic journal, especially when that Forum explores how we express ourselves as scholars. I spoke up only belatedly at the ACCUTE panel on this Forum theme, trying to identify knicker-twisting anxieties that I now want to name as such in print as a rebuff to pseudo-propriety. I also wish to reaffirm our right to a disciplinary or more broadly humanist argot, as well as our need to develop an interventionist vernacular adequate to our obligations and aspirations as critical citizens or even public intellectuals.

To be readily and widely understood is not a crime against "excellence." However, such broad intelligibility comes with risks of misconstrual or rebuttal analogous to those that attend the employment in professional contexts of terms like "phallogocentric" or "hegemonic" or, indeed, "fetching" or "felicitous." Intelligibility of the more popular or populist sort comes also with the risk of guild disparagement and the charge of "dumbing down" or politicizing scholarship in order to seek the limelight beyond the cloisters or to comply with SSHRC's demand that we become simultaneously sexier and more plainly utilitarian, both flashers and state functionaries. But, to return to the venerable notion of the garment of style, do we really need to wear both a thong and drawers, and at the same time? In the following intervention, I want to accentuate the positive force of "having to write like that" as a form of discursive apprenticeship leading to usable legitimacy and also as a form of obligatory forthrightness unwelcome in many quarters, especially during the so-called War on Terror. My positive emphasis is not designed to resolve our discursive tensions and quandaries but to connect them to the constitutive contradictions of academic capitalism in neo-liberal madrasahs across Canada and the rest of the First World, today.

Acquiring and Asserting Our Discursive Rights

As we know, notions of the plain style have complex histories and ideological connections. Clarity can come as readily from authoritarian presumption as from magisterial synthesis, and such clarity can threaten as well as reassure, depending on where readers are situated in the social hierarchies of the time. Clarity can also seem simplistic or treacherous, audacity masquerading as validity. And like clarity, obscurity or difficulty plays differently with different audiences, exasperating or incensing some while persuading or impressing others. This underscores what ought to be obvious to all: academic discourse can and should be challenging, and the licence to challenge granted willingly to the theoretical physicist or legal scholar should be granted with equal readiness to the literary scholar. Unless the academic assignment of discursive rights is as skewed as the disciplinary distribution of resources and prestige, then we are as entitled to explore arcane matters in unfamiliar terms, logics, and specialized genres as any other group engaged in intellectual work. To claim this is not to excuse bad writing (and therefore sloppy thinking) but is to point to the fact that there is no single intelligibility index or stylistic standard against which to measure what we do as literary scholars, and that plural standards are too often made to furnish double standards expressing the wealth-creating ideologies that so clearly dominate current understanding and support of academic values. Can it be right to say, "I won't trust a scientist whose prose I can readily comprehend, but I do demand that literary types write for 'the man in the street or on the Hackney omnibus'"?

But if nobody reads us but us, there are several questions that flow from such a restricted sense of audience. For example, if this is indeed the case, why is it a problem, unless the subsidizing of academic publishing in the humanities is deemed a luxury or an impediment to de-skilling literary studies into literacy...