Imagine that!

I told my senior capstone students this week that "academic writing" need not be dull or dry or incomprehensible but can in fact convey sophisticated ideas with sparkling clarity, but sometimes I wonder. All week I've been trudging dutifully through a new and possibly important work of literary scholarship, but I'm about ready to toss it out the window.

Early on I decided to grit my teeth and overlook the occasional bits of tortured syntax and mangled idioms, and I refrained from tearing out my eyeballs when I reached the line about the "global chickens...coming home to roost." I read that "it is for the first time since World War II that critics may have to consider resetting the boundaries of the present" and I wasted only a few moments wondering, "what is the 'it' that is?"

I even resolved to put aside my prejudice against the use of "imaginary" as a noun, and I was doing pretty well until I got to this passage: "In approaching the cosmodern predominantly as an imaginary configuration--in canvassing the cosmodern imaginary--I insist, then, on the ontological inscription of an imaginary that captures objects and facts undoubtedly 'real,' 'out there.' As it does so, this imaginary imagines, gives them imaginal bodies but does not quite make them up."

Thirty-nine pages into the book and I'm ready to conduct a non-imaginary defenestration. If you happen to be walking past my office window--duck!