A modest but effective example of the sort of thing Eliot had in mind is the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. Previous winners have included the Marxist Fredric Jameson and the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. This year’s winner is Judith Butler, a celebrated “Queer Theorist” who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Hailed by one admirer as “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,” Professor Butler won with this sentence published in the journal Diacritics:  

The move from the 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 ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 May 1999, on page 3
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