The Chronicle of Higher Education has an essay wondering what happened to academic style. Yes, it could be a tired complaint, except for the fact that contemporary academic writing in the humanities (outside history) may be well-written for some purposes but won’t surprise anyone with its grace. Furthermore, the author Ben Yagoda actually examines the “style” instruction manuals, contrasting Strunk and White with more contemporary guides.
Strunk and White aren’t talking about clothing, but “good or approved” hits home. They are really putting forward a negative normative. That is, they and their followers view style as an absence of faults –Â an elimination of all grammatical mistakes and solecisms, of breeziness, opinions, clichÃ(c)s, jargon, mixed metaphors, passive-voice constructions, wordiness, and so on. The implicit and sometimes explicit goal is a transparent prose, in which the writing exists solely to serve the meaning, and no trace of the author –Â no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style –Â should remain.
Contemporary style guides invoke a therapeutic discourse of the writer struggle to break free into ultimate expressivitiy. Whereas the postwar hegemony was for a reader-oriented style, the contemporary instruction is for a writer-oriented one. Yaguda clearly sympathizes with the latter for all its problems, as a corrective to the detached, jargon-centric prose of literary studies and allied disciplines.
The argument is fine as it goes. Then I come across this paragraph,
Today in English departments in the United States and Britain, stylisticians are few and far and between and tend to be graybeards approaching retirement. What happened? In a word, poststructuralism. Perhaps the most influential of the many ideas of the deconstructionists and other theorists who emerged in France in the 1960s was that “privileging” writers, as the Romantic tradition had done for some 200 years, was a grave mistake. All they were doing, after all, was unconsciously inscribing power relations in society and other circumstances beyond their control. That being the case, wasn’t it silly for critics to sit at their feet, as it were, endlessly describing their attributes, one of which was style? One might as well analyze a magazine advertisement or a comic book, and, in fact, the deconstructionists did so. In 1969 Michel Foucault closed his essay “What Is an Author?” with a quotation from Samuel Beckett: “What difference does it make who is speaking?”
Whoa! First, I think Yaguda misrepresent Foucault’s What is an Author essay, which for all its polemicism wasn’t ultimately saying “the author is dead, so don’t bother to write well.” It was merely a directive that seeking individual coherence behind works we ascribe to an author is an exercise in fictive unity. That may seem radical in the context of literary veneration (how can you say there’s no Joyce!), but a look at auteurist theory in film studies can suggest how one can treat the author as a textual effect without denying the existence of art, technique or style.
But more importantly, the “poststructuralism” is a moving target and scapegoat both. If you examine Yaguda’s complaints, it seems that it’s not postmodernism that brought about the death of style, but the dismantling of the canon and the equivalence of popular and high-literary texts. As someone who’s studied film from within the aegis of a literature department, I can assure you the canon is not dead and that even poststructuralist literary scholars still see popular culture as a second-rate object of study. But that’s the attack on the “author” that Yaguda should properly cite. And its genesis is not with poststructuralism, but with structuralism and semiotics, which first made claims for literary studies as a quasi-scientific endeavor, with its own measured detached language. Roland Barthes could be quite a good writer, but take one look at S/Z and you can see the author-effacement Yaguda is diagnosing.
If anything, poststructuralism has been a backing away from that impulse toward (faux) scientificity, by importing belle-lettristic models of scholarship from a group of marginal French academics we associate with poststructuralism. Hence the number of undergraduates who want to write senior theses in poetry, inspired by the work of Julia Kristeva.
That canard taken care of, what else can we pin on those pesky deconstructionists?
[Note: this post was amended to correct an earlier misreading of mine.]
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