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He's won the "Bad Writing Contest" twice, but now Professor Fredric R. Jameson has won the $900,000 Holberg Prize.

"The prize, established in 2003 by the Norwegian Parliament and worth about $900,000 this year, is awarded annually to an outstanding scholar in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, theology, or law."

The Duke literature professor has written such things as "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism."

His 1997 "Bad Writing" prize honored such sentences as -- from "Signatures of the Visible":

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).

Were you ever required to read that sort of thing? Did you ever assign such readings to yourself?

Full post as published by Althouse on November 26, 2008 (boomark / email).