Postmodernist prose and George Orwell
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14855831 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen K Roney, S Roney (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 13-23 |
| Publication date | 2002-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Academic Questions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0895-4852 • E-ISSN: 1936-4709 |
| Publisher | National Association of Scholars (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s12129-002-1071-6 |
| OpenAlex | W1968999971 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 1 |
The essential notion of English style since the 1920s has been that clarity and simplicity are the essence of good writing. Orwell in England, Strunk & White in America,1 have been the main proponents. We might call this, for the sake of argument, the modern style. There is a new challenge to this in contemporary academics. Judith Butler is the spokesperson. She has been charged with bad writing, along with such scholars as Gayatri Spivak.2 Indeed, she won the annual “Bad Writing Award” from the journal Philosophy and Literature. Butler responded, in a letter to the London Review of Books and in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, that clarity and simplicity are impossible if one is discussing a topic deeply. She claims for her side such writers as Adorno and Marcuse. This might be called, for the sake of argument, the postmodern claim. Are Butler and the postmodernists right? Have editors been holding back academic and social progress? Have we been dumbing the culture down? First, let’s note Orwell’s argument for simplicity and clarity, presented in his essay “Politics and the English Language.”3
Art · Art history · Higher education · Literature · Philosophy of education · Political science · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Law · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |