Melville House Books

It was one of the great academic scandals of the 1990s: in January 1999, when Rhetoric professor Judith Butler won Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest, organized by Arts and Letters Daily founder Denis Dutton, she was the subject of ridicule in numerous articles from The New York Times to Lingua Franca and elsewhere, and Dutton’s fame was boosted, especially when he wrote about it all for The Wall Street Journal. As Mark Bauerlein writes in this article from the new Philosophy and Literature, “not a single voice outside the academic theory realm rose to defend” Butler. As Bauerlein puts it, “the contest’s ridicule went unchallenged. Beyond the campus walls the 1999 Bad Writing Contest did its job, solidifying the image of theorists as an aimless coterie of pseudo-radicals playing to one another and inflicting shopworn countercultural messages on their captive students.” But now, Butler is back, along with her runner-up and others, in a book they’ve put together called Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. The writers—Butler, Jonathan Culler, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Johnson, and Peter Brooks—”represent the leading theoretical schools of the last forty years,” says Bauerlein. “As might be expected, their essays broach the issue in a scholarly and theoretical way, not as polemic or forensic but as rumination upon the premises of the affair. None of the contributors denies the label ‘bad writing’ or aims to show that theoretical prose is good writing. That’s the conservative or common sense application, and the theorists know better than to accept its conditions.” In fact, says the book’s intro, the collected essays “are less about proving innocence than contesting the terms of the allegations.”

• RELATED: Denis Dutton had a few scandals of his own, as this MobyLives investigation found out two years ago.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.