World's Worst Writing

The academic journal Philosophy and Literature chose the following three pieces of writing in its "bad style" contest. Irony and parody were excluded from the contest, so all three are genuine pieces of academic writing.

In each case, read the piece, comment on its stylistic weaknesses and write a clearer version which can be understood more easily but which omits no significant content. Finally, write a commentary describing what changes you made why you made them and what difficulties you encountered. If you have difficulties in understanding a passage you should use a dictionary to determine meaning if that is possible.

FIRST PRIZE

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature,University of California 1997

SECOND PRIZE

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalise" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality"
Homi K Bhabha, professor of English, University of Chicago 1994

THIRD PRIZE

"As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet's work of 'les noms du pré, a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus ('Les Non-dupes errent'), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihalates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomeno-logically irreducible dyad of the mother and child."
Steven Z Levine in Twelve Views of Manet's Bar (Princeton UP 1996)