File Under Ignorant, Tendentious . . . and Just Plain Dull

Stephen Metcalf’s “The Death of Literary Theory—Is it really a good thing?” in Slate the other day. (Link omitted by intent.)

People pick on academic writing for being formulaic, by really, isn’t there also an algorithm by now that can pump out sentences like “Did Post-Modernism—in this instance, some twilit mélange of Gadamer and Lyotard and Habermas and Kuhn and Latour, many of whose original beachhead in America had been the credulous English department—overreach in taking on science?”

Note “Post-Modernism,” the capitalization and hyphen just as awkward in its own way as a forty-something prof trying to sound down for his students.

Slate, of course, has also recently given us “The Attack of the Career Killing Blogs.”