Big, Old Dykes

[lsanderson]

QUESTIONS FOR TERRY CASTLE
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: January 15, 2010

Your latest book, “The Professor,” comes out on Tuesday, and I’m not sure which is more surprising: the candid disclosures about your love life or the sparkling and witty prose, which you do not expect from a professor of literature at Stanford University. Why does academic writing tend to be so unreadable?

Paradoxically, academic writers are often inhibited when it comes to speaking directly, possibly because they were all little goody-goodies in junior high school, and they’re being massed together in university departments, and when you put all the smartest kids in the class together, there’s a tremendous anxiety about whether one can live up to the seriousness of the enterprise. More