Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Introduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down 1
4. Part 1. In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates and the History of Philosophy
5. 1. Difficult Style and “Illustrious” Vernaculars 15
6. 2. Hume’s Learned and Conversable Worlds 29
7. 3. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 43
8. 4. The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning 58
9. Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor
10. 5. Feminism’s Broken English 75
11. 6. The Resistance of Theory; or,The Worth of Agony 95
12. 7. Styles of Intellectual Publics 106
13. Part 3. Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness
14. 8. On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity 129
15. 9. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics 139
16. 10. Bad Writing 157
17. Part 4. Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment
18. 11. The Morality of Form; or,What’s “Bad” about “Bad Writing”? 171
19. 12. The Politics of the Production of Knowledge 181
20. 13. Values of Difficulty 199
21. Contributors 217
22. Index 221