[voidhorse]

That’s fair. I would agree there is a certain “big words == more intellectual == smarter” or “more difficult == smarter” fallacy that arises somewhat frequently in contemporary humanities papers.

I think part of it might originate from the fact that the abstractions used for talking about things in the humanities aren’t fixed as well as they are in science. Take the abstract in question for example—the writer uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and abstraction to try to describe interactions and relationships between texts/narratives—while it’s not an absurd metaphor, it’s difficult to grok, because there is no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of relationships. You could argue the object of study isn’t as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have fairly standardized abstractions like “waveform” etc. that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.

[chartpath]

I think that there is a thing called literary nonfiction which does use these higher level abstractions.

It might be that they are less fixed, as you say. That is a feature rather than a bug. It would take so much more text to describe everything literally than to use literary devices, which seem to be things that humans are really good at grasping. They are everywhere in film and TV but not everyone has experience naming them and referring to them in text at a meta level.

Imagine writing a symbolic AI in Go or C. There is a reason why people use Lisps and functional languages for very dense abstractions. They just do a lot of work, which some folks choose to deride as magic.