ipecac cogently defends Butler who was attacked by Fields.
Butler was also attacked by Dutton, though in snarky rather than militant fashion, though it could be said Fields felt empowered to her militancy by Dutton; though it should be mentioned that Fields is not attacking Butler as Butler, for her writing or her thought, but as a symbolic representative of an 'academic culture' whose 'bargain basement moralism' and 'inability to write with coherence and argue with clarity' has resulted in its becoming an 'educational quagmire'.
Dutton, like most of the rest of us, one assumes, a child of the Great Simplifying, holds Butler up to ridicule for her incomprehensibility, but as ipecac demonstrates nicely it's pretty much just xenophobia in sheep's clothing. Butler speaks from a place the language borders on the foreign, in a vertical rather than horizontal sense. She betrays nothing in the paragraph so widely held up for scorn of having spoken that way for any other reason than the necessities of clarity and context.
There's a special animosity reserved for those who demonstrate an intelligence that doesn't bend toward its inferiors. This animosity has been developed and encouraged by the beneficiaries of an ignorant public.
It's a violation of the social contract now to say anything a high school sophomore couldn't understand. To say something beyond the comprehension of most college graduates is virtually obscene.
That the widely-quoted sentence of Butler's was an abstract, a compression of an intellectually complex article into one thick sentence, like a synopsis, meant to sum up and lead toward its fuller explication, goes unmentioned.
That Butler is a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, and a Jew, among many other attributes, hasn't made her immune to attack, certainly. That she can be elequently clear and accessible when she chooses, as in this piece in the London Review of Books, makes Dutton's ridicule seem oddly inapt.
Dutton further arouses suspicion by quoting Warren Hedges' remark that Butler is "[p]robably one of the ten smartest people on the planet..." as though Hedges must be even more trivial as a writer and thinker than Butler for his admiration of her.
It's a Fox News hit piece for people who read more than one book a week.
�
Butler's sentence, the target of Dutton's snark, was diagrammed by Ratliff, in a neutral sort of echo-snark of Dutton's piece.
Butler was also attacked by Dutton, though in snarky rather than militant fashion, though it could be said Fields felt empowered to her militancy by Dutton; though it should be mentioned that Fields is not attacking Butler as Butler, for her writing or her thought, but as a symbolic representative of an 'academic culture' whose 'bargain basement moralism' and 'inability to write with coherence and argue with clarity' has resulted in its becoming an 'educational quagmire'.
Dutton, like most of the rest of us, one assumes, a child of the Great Simplifying, holds Butler up to ridicule for her incomprehensibility, but as ipecac demonstrates nicely it's pretty much just xenophobia in sheep's clothing. Butler speaks from a place the language borders on the foreign, in a vertical rather than horizontal sense. She betrays nothing in the paragraph so widely held up for scorn of having spoken that way for any other reason than the necessities of clarity and context.
There's a special animosity reserved for those who demonstrate an intelligence that doesn't bend toward its inferiors. This animosity has been developed and encouraged by the beneficiaries of an ignorant public.
It's a violation of the social contract now to say anything a high school sophomore couldn't understand. To say something beyond the comprehension of most college graduates is virtually obscene.
That the widely-quoted sentence of Butler's was an abstract, a compression of an intellectually complex article into one thick sentence, like a synopsis, meant to sum up and lead toward its fuller explication, goes unmentioned.
That Butler is a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, and a Jew, among many other attributes, hasn't made her immune to attack, certainly. That she can be elequently clear and accessible when she chooses, as in this piece in the London Review of Books, makes Dutton's ridicule seem oddly inapt.
Dutton further arouses suspicion by quoting Warren Hedges' remark that Butler is "[p]robably one of the ten smartest people on the planet..." as though Hedges must be even more trivial as a writer and thinker than Butler for his admiration of her.
It's a Fox News hit piece for people who read more than one book a week.
�
Butler's sentence, the target of Dutton's snark, was diagrammed by Ratliff, in a neutral sort of echo-snark of Dutton's piece.
