You might also be interested in the different styles of calligraphy, because the more “poetic” a writer was/is being, the less actually legible the writing becomes. (This is true even in modern Western calligraphic traditions, according to the instructors of the seminars my uncle attends.)

Then again, maybe you shouldn’t look into any of this, but should instead look for work on Western approaches to stereotypes of Eastern/Asian art. Orientalism certainly has a lot of theoretical language associated with it. It could add whole new depths to any amount of desired incomprehensibility!

One thing that came out of both Holbo’s piece and a conversation I had with my adviser was that academic writing tends to be polite. Respectful. Sometimes circumlocution is a way of not directly engaging with/arguing with someone you disagree with or want to criticize.

I have been misusing abstraction, perhaps. OED: “considering a thing independently of its associations.” You have pointed to Futurist & Cubist objects that strip away the specificity of the subjects they echo; I have been writing more vaguely about literary concepts stripped of their experiential context, à la Alter/Oppenheimer: Hamlet as “tragic tale of revenge and existential angst.”

Finally, inevitably: over on The Valve, John Holbo writes much smarter things than I did about academic style and the ways we discuss it.

If not him then, um, those dudes who draw the machinery? Hold on, let me search for stuff…ok, I can’t find the paintings of squares within squares within squares, but I know they exist, just not who did them…

what about this series? Or this guy’s thingies? (Actually I can’t find pics and description so go look at that header and then read the wikipedia page.)

Maybe I just don’t know what abstract means?

However, I am telepathic, evidently. Cool. If only I could use this power to rule the world instead of divine people’s dissertations!

I’ll grab Taylor’s Hegel from the library this week: I’m dead curious to learn from him. If Taylor can write about Hegel concretely, then I have no excuse…

I’m no Pound scholar, but his Imagist works seem to me as though they are asking readers to bring their own abstractions with them to the text. His pseudo-translations of Chinese poems, which I think were roughly contemporary with “In a station,” have all these beautiful and detailed glosses. (One critic I’m reading—Daniel Albright—compares Pound’s reading of one short poem to Anna Karenina.) But I’m not sure that an ordinary reader could come at one of Pound’s poems and develop the abstractions of that gloss unaided.

Japanese paintings present an interesting problem, and I’d love to hear everything you have to say about them. I’m writing on conceptions of Japanese painting at the moment—An Artist of the Floating World, etc.—and I’ve noticed that some scholars associate Japanese painting with simplicity but not necessarily abstraction.

Here are a few lines from Gabriele Annan’s infamous NYRB review (1989) of Ishiguro’s first three novels:

“Ishiguro writes in English. His English is perfect, and not just in the obvious sense: it is accurate, unhurried, fastidious, and noiseless. A hush seems to lie over it, compounded of mystery and discretion. The elegant bareness inevitably reminds one of Japanese painting.”

At least three critics have picked up on Annan’s review as an example of a certain kind of cultural misreading. Rebecca Walkowitz—my wonderful advisor—argues that Annan’s recourse to Japanese painting as a descriptor for “elegant bareness” is culturally naive in a way similar to her apparent misreading of Ishiguro’s lingual background: we western critics have chosen to understand Japanese painting in a certain way, and as a consequence have a tendency to flatten or simplify what the painting is doing. (“Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds,” 1056-7.)

Sorry, this has become the Comment of Wordy Doom; it’s just that you hit on a topic that I am deeply interested in, and I was hoping to hear your thoughts on the subject.

I think I have finally decided I am not a theorist. But I love theory. _But_, what I love about it is taking something very difficult and abstract and teaching it to someone by using a very concrete and surprising metaphor. (Or analogy. Or whatever.) So I’m always moving back and forth in scale from abstract to concrete to abstract. (Which brings me back to Pound: No ideas but in things! Go in fear of abstractions! Or something like that.)

I do see good points in that quote about Hamlet — I just finished grading a bunch of finals that summarized a bunch of plots and told me that these plots were important because they were important. (Guess what tip I told them to help prep for the final?) But there is a _huge_ difference between the jump between literal plot-level stuff and the themes of Hamlet, and the next jump from the themes and structures of Hamlet to, I dunno, Hamlet through the eyes of Deluze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus.

I want to decouple these two phrases. While there’s plenty of criticism that needlessly obscures its point via over-abstraction, it’s possible to write abstractly yet clearly as well. In other words, there’s a difference between abstract language and the obscurity that results from using abstractions without really knowing what they mean. Take Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel, which very clearly outlines the work of one of the most abstract of philosophers while respecting philosophical rigor.

Sianne Ngai’s book Ugly Feelings also springs to mind as one example of a book about literature that combines concrete detail with abstract concepts in a very readable way.