What I found curious about the MLA is that A-list celebrities, so to speak, were not nearly as good as the B-list ones.
Homi Bhabha was a bit of a disappointment but not in an expected way. He doesn’t speak in a nearly as convoluted and incomprehensible manner as he writes. In fact, he is a good, forceful, clear speaker. I didn’t have a problem with the form of his delivery but with the content. He spoke about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book and everything he said I’d already heard before. The talk sounded like a pastiche of all of the reviews of the book, and I found no new insights in anything Bhabha said.
Rita Felski was undoubtedly the star of this MLA. She recently published a new book on theory (and I mean on, not of), and everybody else took care to bash this book in their talks. Which is already a sign of Felski’s importance because here you are, obsessing over her book while she has no idea that you exist. Felski’s own talk was good but not amazing.
The amazing talks were delivered by people who are not that famous but are on their way to making it. One session that I visited had 7 absolutely outstanding speakers. I loved all of them with a passion.
The moral of the story is that one should retire on time and open up a space for younger talent.
Clarissa's Blog 
“.. as convoluted and incomprehensible manner as he writes”
What is your view on this popular criticism of academic writing? Do you think academics have some responsibility towards making their writing more understandable to non-academics?
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There is actually a movement among academics to make academic writing as incomprehensible as possible to bar access to the hoi polloi. I find this whole idea stupid and disgusting.
I believe that if you can’t write in a way that’s accessible to normal people, your writing is worthless. I have been criticized by some reviewers for writing in a,way that’s “too simple” but I think they are idiots. I can pepper my speech with “hermeneutics” and “ontological” as well as anybody but I don’t because it’s idiotic. If nobody can understand my ideas, then what’s the point? I sometimes publish bits from my book here on the blog and people don’t distinguish them from regular posts, which makes me very happy.
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By the way, feminist Toril Moi at Duke also believes that it’s important for writing in the humanities disciplines to be clear and accessible. I used to worry that my own scholarly work wasn’t any good because my writing was too “simplistic.”
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I believe that if you can’t write in a way that’s accessible to normal people, your writing is worthless.
Absolutely! I often get compliments on the writing in my papers and grants from the people who review them. It seems that people are traumatized by convoluted writing, and are ecstatic when they get to review something that is not torture. Regular blogging is not only a great way to improve the clarity of one’s writing, but I believe it removes (or at least lowers) the barriers that prevent some people from even starting to write. I now simply sit down and write, whatever it is that I need to, and I know that, for me, this process has become painless largely thanks to blogging.
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I believe that if you can’t write in a way that’s accessible to normal people, your writing is worthless.
I do not think this is universally true. In technical fields, there is a lot of specialized vocabulary that cannot be simplified. If one tries, it is at the expense of correctness or clarity. As an example, one of the results in a publication of mine (with a colleague) is that every self-homeomorphism of a product of two pseudo-arcs is a product of homeomorphisms of the separate factors, composed possibly with a factor switch. This is perfectly clear to anyone in my field, but it cannot be explained in everyday English in fewer than about 10000 words.
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And those 10000 words would be incomprehensible even to specialists, most likely, because the text would be so complicated and difficult to follow.
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“I do not think this is universally true. In technical fields, there is a lot of specialized vocabulary that cannot be simplified.”
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I responded here:
Just tryin’ to shoo some traffic my way….
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Finally someone is self-promoting. I’ve been trying to get people to do this for years.
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I’ve been accused of having “workmanlike prose,” which I suppose makes me not a great writer. The reviewer that gave me that comment still recommended that the paper be published though, because it was something new and interesting. How dare I make it accessible? 😉
Anyway, I have been emboldened by several of the things I’ve been reading lately to just write the way I want to and cultivate my passions. If some people don’t like it, whatever. There will be others who do.
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