The Eagleton Equation, or, are scholarship and readability alternatives?

what do you think of honcderich's oxford companion to philosophy. i used to find it v hepful and am thinking of digging it out

Perhaps hyper-academic language is only necessary when fine-tuning, questioning or developing new positions or theories. When talking about accepted or extant concepts, a degree of lassistude can be taken into account that does away with the need for every tiny detail to be semantically accurate.

Maybe there should be a digest version as well as an uncut version but whether that's feasible i just don't know.

Basically if you ever have to explain what your saying after the fact or wave yer hand saying you know what I mean, then you've flubbed it. But who is your audience in the first place....

Frank Kermode has good things to say on this matter in his introduction to 'An Appetite for Poetry' I think.

So I'm not thinking so much about textbook clarification which can be dry and still do its job, but the kind of style which says 'look, there's basically only two things you really need to get about this and they are...' or 'the choice comes down to'. Which shades very easily into the kind of rhetorical techniques which set up a question in such a way that to the 'right' and 'wrong' answers are very obvious.

I think Pete is dead right also -> this is particularly the case where language is used in messy and conflicting ways at the same time (see the endless arguments we could have over the meaning of 'culture'). (Redoubled when it's that messy aspect of communication which you want to talk about, say). I think a useful technique is to say 'we use the term in the following ways' as a way of clarifying things (i.e. I'm sympathetic to some analytic philosophy because it seems to do just this very well) but it does pose certain intractable problems in the area I work in. e.g. how to talk about Hegel's idea of 'reason': reason in English doesn't seem to cover it, now 'knowing' or 'understanding', 'rationality'? But I think the test of a good writer would be to use these terms in ways which don't mystify or confuse... and without clumsy circumlocutions the whole time.

FWIW I have always assumed that there is no necessary opposition between scholarship / academic integrity and readability but that might only be an ideal; in practice you're always going to have to trade one off against the other a bit, if only because no-one likes to read something so hedged with 'buts' and 'although some might say'...

But who wants to have an introduction saying 'by the way, all this might be bollocks, make up your own mind'.

yes and no
i've enjoyed anything i've read by you,up to a point,but i always get the feeling that i'm missing out on some points,or find sentences that i can't really figure out,things like that...
i still enjoy reading it,so i suppose it is readable,but its not exactly the clearest,most straightforeward writing in the world...

having said that,i am,despite the fact that i do read quite a lot,particularly bad at following what i'm reading,in terms of any abstract concepts,allusions,or even complicated plots in novels/films

a lot of my efforts to read various theorists (efforts which,to be fair,have been fairly half arsed) have resulted in me giving up through not following what is being said,although perhaps this is to do with me throwing myself in at the deep end,in that my reading to date has been very haphazard,without any really basic grounding in various schools of thought...

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1791

TERRY EAGLETON IS A FUNNY MAN. Writing about Hal Gladfelder’s Fanny Hill in Bombay for the London Review of Books, he offered an overview of the changes in academic manners and morals he has seen over the last few decades. “In the prelapsarian 1960s,” Eagleton recalls:

a typical critical essay might be entitled “Window Imagery in the Later Pasternak,” while in the theoretico-political 1970s, “Class Struggle in The Divine Comedy” was a more predictable topic. By the 1980s and 1990s, conference papers with titles like “Putting the Anus back into Coriolanus” had arrived on the scene.

This is great stuff, and the fact that Eagleton’s own career has thrived amidst these intellectual tectonic shifts makes it all the more hilarious. Mock what you know.

Is requiring interest in the topic the same as requiring knowledge of the topic?