| I'll try to answer. I absolutely don't think this look cherry-picked. In fact I think it looks like a reasonable humanities abstract! Note that I am far from a specialist in literature, but I do love to read. First of all, although it uses some precise vocabulary, this abstract does not seem to have the particular blandness of much academic writing (I definitely agree that poor writing is often easy to find in all branches of academy). One little proxy to look at is the overuse of nominalization (i.e. using a noun form where a verb form could work). And not all nominalization is bad. The word "nominalization" is actually self-describing. For example, perhaps we could "clean" this passage (my quote is a fragment of a participle phrase at the end of a sentence) >... , their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery. into a new independent clause: > They formally and thematically interconnect, repeating and necessarily revising how one presents history,self-identifies, and recovers. But this "fix" might blur the original meaning in critical ways. For example, who now is this "one" being spoken of? That seemed to me to be the best option, over the worse pronouns "you" and "we" (which would be speaking for someone else). The original phrases avoid this entity identification, focusing instead on the general action. I also removed enact, but what if these texts really do "enact" a revision? This "creation upon creation" of the an action seems in-line with the concept of a palimpsest, which is a repurposed book (I'll speak more on the palimpsest after I dissect my awful revision). Then, I completely butchered the last concepts. To present history is only one aspect of the general practice of historiography. Revising an identity is not the same as self-identifying (and, again, who is this self?). To recover matches with the action of recovery more closely, but using the verb would destroy the sentence's parallelism. Hopefully, this example demonstrates the great difficulty of using precise language with heavy, complex concepts. On to the subject itself, using the word "palimpsest" doesn't seem obscure. Perhaps the author's central thesis is that the works that she studies have repurposed old texts or old memories of trauma again and again. This seems like a suitable metaphor. Or, maybe palimpsest has a special technical meaning in her body of scholarship. And the abstract does carefully lay out the scholarly tradition that the paper follows, going chapter by chapter. Readers familiar with the works she mentions will probably be happy for this guided summary. Readers not familiar, like me for almost all the names, may not even be part of the intended audience. Lastly it seems like she uses two different authors to explore her own scholarly interests in trauma, gender, sexuality, and self. These seem like great things to study, and very complex indeed.
Even if these themes were not on the minds of the authors who are the subject of this paper, these authors nevertheless do live in the world, and their work necessarily incorporates fragments of inherited thought (like how you and I speak English, whose development we had nothing to do with). Maybe this paper finds some unexpected connections. > that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently I don't know anything about nervous systems. But in these kind of works, there are not any exact answers. You cannot say `gcc gender-paper.c` and find out if it compiles. Instead, these ideas have to be written about and discussed against a wider body of thought. And there's probably some element of judgement and metaphor required to think this way. And the ideas in these works in fact do slowly disseminate and affect society. That's my spiel. I typed it up because I see these kind of comments often, and I wanted to put a good response on record. ---- I also don't believe there is zero obscurantism in the humanities, by the way. Shitty research happens everywhere. But, every time the humanities gets slammed as being particularly soft, it seems like the reader forgets all the articles on the front page about falsified scientific results, unreproducible research, political machinations to get tenure, outright grift, etc. |