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Denis Dutton
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CAREER

Dutton is a native of and the University Of Michigan-Dearborn .

Dutton has worked in radio through much of his career and he served for seven years (1995 - 2002) as Director of Radio New Zealand .


CONTROVERSY

In 1995, Dutton used his editorship of the journal ''Philosophy and Literature'' to expose what he considered the pretence and conceit of the wilfully obscurantist prose styles of many literary and cultural theorists. The contest noted the tortured prose of figures such as Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson . In 1998, the Bad Writing Contest awarded first place to University Of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler , for a piece which appeared in the journal Diacritics. The winning sentence read:
  • 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.

    • Dutton noted, "To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it."


After winning the award, Butler refuted the charges of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of the New York Times and the affair briefly became a cause célèbre in the world of academic theorists. (See also Alan Sokal .) Dutton ended the contest after the public kerfuffle, but Butler's sentence is still today cited by critics of postmodernism as an outstanding example of meaningless academese.


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