Prof. Brian Leiter (Law & Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin) has remarked upon a brief article recently published by Prof. Jonathan Wolff (Philosophy, University College London) about the preponderance of boring writing in academia. (They implicitly seem to mean humanities and social science writing, since it is difficult even to apply the criterion to writing in the hard sciences.) Both are interesting reads, not surprisingly, since nobody would dare pen a tedious disquisition on boring writing.
Until now. I, too, have an opinion on the matter. And it goes something…like…this…
First, I think the topic is ripe for discussion, since it acknowledges the aesthetic component of a style of writing whose style is ordinarily ignored. Second, Prof. Wolff makes a good point, but he seems to assume that non-academic writing—even the sort that maintains the mystery—is not often boring. Right off the top of my head I can think of a couple of highly acclaimed novels I’ve tried to endure during the past two or three years that I found painfully boring: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Stephen Carter’s Emperor of Ocean Park. Both were tedious, to my mind, in part because of the stylistic factor Prof. Leiter notes (Carter’s being much more agonizingly overwrought than DeLillio’s). On the other hand, I adore the work of a novelist whose books tend to be fairly predictable, Anita Brookner, largely because of the stylistic elegance of her writing and also, I suppose, because I enjoy her thematic concerns.
Third, Prof. Wolff’s plot/story dichotomy was famously illustrated by E.M. Forster, along these lines: A story reads, "The queen died, then the king died." A plot, "The queen died, then the king died of grief." This mildly complicates Prof. Wolff’s notions of "tension" and "suspense," since the plot as Forster illustrates it actually provides more information than the story ("the narrative sequence," as the professor puts it), inasmuch as it addresses causation, a human emotional factor that invites empathy, and so forth.
In short, I think that academic writing does not have a monopoly on boring writing, and that the secret to interesting writing is not as easily formulated as Prof. Wolff recommends. I also think there are examples of literary analysis of academic writing, albeit not of the sort Prof. Wolff intends, I imagine. But that topic will have to wait for another day.
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “This Post Is About Boring Academic Writing (Dean)”
I agree with your basic point, which I’d extend to add, after listening yesterday to a CD compilation freebie included in a Paste Magazine, there are worlds of boring music (and movies, and art) out there, as well. DeLillo and Carter seem like complicated examples, though, since in different ways, both are rather “academic.” My impression of DeLillo is probably skewed by having read only White Noise, which, along with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (very entertaining, not boring), was part of a required prominent shelf display of big books at just about every apartment I frequented in NYC in the 1990s. Trying to read White Noise, in particular, always made me wonder whether people actually read those books. I found it belabored and pedantic, qualities I associate with bad academic writing. Part of the hype about The Emperor of Ocean Park was that it was written by an academic from a non-literary field, a Yale Law professor. Stephen Carter taught me (whatever it is I know of) Copyright, Trademark, and Patent. Stylistic mess that it is, EOP is far more interesting than were his class lectures, which were painful. Like many readers, I think it interested me most as a portrait of a certain, Washington DC based, middle class African American world that’s under-represented in American media of any form. In that sense its most compelling quality was the absence it demonstrated, rather than in its internal merits. Feel free to “problematize” that boring academic sentence.
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Vacation is nearly ending – checking in on the blog from the Land of Enchantment.
I wasn’t able to plough through EOP despite some faint praises from my fellow book club members. I remember wondering if its unreadability had anything to do with the author being a professor! But I won’t paint with a broad brush. During my stint as a student I have read physics and biochemistry textbooks which read better than many novels in their balance of plot and story. And in my lifelong addiction to murder-mysteries, I am sure I have read more than one excellent whodunnit which began, “In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.”
My gentle reminder to Professor Wolff : “In an otherwise bucolic profession, reading tedious papers and theses may be the worst pain an academic may have to endure. Outside the ivory tower, things are much more scary.”
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Anna: It’s true that DeLillo and Carter have stronger associations with the academy than, say, Danielle Steel. For that matter, Anita Brookner, whose work I lauded, is a professor of art history at Cambridge. But I don’t think this fact especially troubles my point. Both of the books I mention were bestsellers, that is, they were happily received outside the academy. Anyway, I don’t think Wollf and Leiter meant “academic writing” to refer to any kind of writing—fiction, poetry, belle-lettristic essays—by folks who have close ties to the academy. They were referring to works produced by academics qua academics, and published in peer-reviewed journals serving the academy, the sorts of work that count for academic reputation on a CV. Neither Underworld nor EOP would satisfy those criteria.
I recall all of the hoopla about Carter and EOP when it was published. (I read it in a class taught by one of Carter’s friends, in fact, shortly after its release.) Much of it had little to do with its purported literary value. As you note, it had to do with Carter’s reputation as an academic, not to mention with the huge sums of money he was advanced to produce a series of novels, and with the book’s unusual subject. Frankly, I regard that last point of interest as little more than tokenism. Merely writing about a demographic traditionally unrepresented in a genre, without contributing something in the way of literary execution, hardly advances the cause.
I read and enjoyed DeLillo’s Libra, but the pleasure may have been a lingering effect of having read shortly before Mailer’s weird book about Oswald.
As for boring music, I admit that there are at least two kinds of boring. Just yesterday, WFMU in New Jersey played a remarkable hour-long tweak of a Kenny G tune (“Forever in Love,” I think), in which the fellow who re-mixed it looped a phrase, the tonal climax of which he then sustained for, I kid you not, minutes at a time. Then the phrase would repeat…and halt again at the same high tone for several minutes. It was utterly tedious, utterly predictable, but it made me giddy. It was sublimely boring, and a suitable parody of the popular saxophonist’s cloying “style.”
Which goes to show you that boringness is easily “problematized.” If you present boring music or boring literature or boring what-have-you as boring, it suddenly becomes interesting by virtue of that fact. This perhaps explains why Wolff didn’t bother to provide examples of what he meant by boring academic writing. Those examples would have been immensely interesting.
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