From: John Lowther (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Sep 07 2005 - 15:56:17 PDT
i'm a lurker on this list at best, but this discussion has been sort of amusing to me, sort of an 80s nostalgia trip (the halcyon years of bashing anything that could be construed as using jargon or influenced by -- gasp -- those frenchies). yes it is possible to explain in everyday langauge what is meant by terms like "hegemony" or "interpellation" or "deterritorialization," but jeez does it ever take a long time! i well know the feeling of being 'shut out' by the specialized discourse of some field of study but the insistence on plain speech and writing for a general (i.e., 9th grade reading level) public often seems, to me at least, to serve as a way of justifying one's desire NOT to discern what might be meant by all those big words. imagine if one weren't permitted to simply refer to a book that not everyone has read, say, WAR AND PEACE but instead we had to offer an overview of the major themes and encapsulation of the plot? silly i know, but to someone who has learned to work with ideas like inter
pellation, always having to reduce thier discourse to plain speech has got feel sort of like that. its always gotta be a give & take --- if you understood everything you read what would be the point?
jlo
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