3 ms·
It's funny: I was actually prepared to _defend_ this article based on the first line you quoted above. But the rest of it is much, much worse. I have no objec
by davegauer 8y ago
It's funny: I was actually prepared to _defend_ this article based on the first line you quoted above. But the rest of it is much, much worse.
I have no objection at all to long, complex sentences. Not everything needs to be (or can be) distilled into bullet points. But I'm struggling to find enough substance in this book review to merit the epic academic writing.
I'm not saying there _isn't_ an interesting idea buried in there somewhere, but:
> "Rather than seeing time as a scarce, homogeneous resource to be economized or optimized, Lupton invites us to follow her in seeing books as things that introduce difference, discontinuity, and even plasticity into time itself."
Statements to this effect are made several times as if merely repeating it in different, increasingly obfuscated ways makes a stronger point. It does not.
And:
> "Lupton defines the literary, which is the category to which she remains professionally tethered, as a mode of thought characterized by refusing linear or instrumental time use."
Really?
- GCA10 8y agoAgreed. The headline is much bolder and more engaging than the actual article. I'll take a moment to sputter about the phrase "even plasticity." It sounds stark and assertive. But then I check the dictionary and discover that plasticity is really just a $10 word for the more mundane "malleable." In that case, the sentence is wrongly constructed. If it's trying to take us up a crescendo from small changes to big ones, it should read "introduce plasticity, difference and even discontinuity into time itself." I'm being cranky to make a larger point. A lot of academic writing isn't just obscure. It's intellectually sloppy in the way that a badly constructed sermon can be, too. Words are sloshed into place mostly because of the way they sound, rather than careful consideration of their exact meaning.
- jessaustin 8y agoWhat? No! One is a noun and the other is an adjective. Do you really want to replace "plasticity" with "malleability"? Or maybe you prefer "malleableness"? But yes I agree that the writing doesn't flow well. This required a great deal of editing, which it didn't receive. In this particular sentence, the worst offender is "itself". We know we're talking about time; it dominates the first clause of the sentence.
- Firadeoclus 8y agoI don't like the sentence and I'm not even sure what it means to introduce difference into time. But to me the idea of malleable time is the bigger, more surprising concept compared to mere discontinuity which is commonplace.