[denton-scratch]

It's intensely obscurantist. No, it's not rare; some people think that using language that's hard to understand makes you clever. I think true cleverness is explaining concepts that are hard to understand, using language that's easy to understand.

[iworshipfaangs2]

Why not respond to my long comment in this thread, where I defend this abstract? Your sentence---"It's intensely obscurantist"---is forceful-sounding but it has no argument.

I also cannot say whether this paper is deliberately obscure, because I am not a literature professor and I don't know who the audience is. But, I tried to give some arguments for why the abstract looks reasonable. Are you a literature professor?

[denton-scratch]

No, but I can read most scientific and philosophical texts in English, and get the gist. And I'm good enough at reading English to be able to recognise bafflegab when I see it.

If that prose is written in a code that is only meant to be comprehensible to sociologists and postmodernists, I don't see the sense in publishing it (as in, making it public).

[iworshipfaangs2]

>If that prose is written in a code that is only meant to be comprehensible to sociologists and postmodernists, I don't see the sense in publishing it (as in, making it public).

I mean, it was a doctoral dissertation, written exclusively for an audience of Literature PhDs[1]. Other times, these papers are published in specialized journals. Without publishing, how else would they disseminate their research?

And even if it's not for me, I'm always happy for open access to research. So I'm happy whenever postmodern thinkers make their work available to the public, in the same way I am when thinkers of abstract mathematics do. I personally will probably not be looking in either work, though :-).

[1] Cardoza-Kane, Karen M, "Trauma's palimpsests: The narrative cycles of Louise Erdrich and Richard Rodriguez" (2005). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3193887.