| dc.description.abstract | The C-B-S prose style advocated in The Elements of Style and many other handbooks facilitates basic communication but also desensitizes its proponents to the wide variety of aestheticopolitcal traditions that defy plainness-grand, baroque, ornate, opaque, symbolist, surreal, and poststructural style (namely Roland Barthes'). Utilitarian concepts of language and rampant functionalism spur many academics to valorize directness over suggestiveness and pedestrian over poetic usage, breeding knee-jerk repudiation of stylistically challenging texts. Joseph Williams argues that readability norms should hinge on criteria of (hypertelic) efficiency (the facility of typists in processing "plain," as opposed to "convoluted" prose styles). Such view advances corporate agendas by promoting the ideology of transparent facticity. Undue stress on empirical concretion, Ohmann counters, often hampers novice writers' attempts at sociological analysis. The growing influence of the corporate ethos in concert with the imperatives of "scientific correctness" induce the de-poeticization and de-erotization of academic prose; as a result, the sumptuous crop of natural metaphor has been blighted by the pest of rigidly technical usage. Bereft of the formal elan with which the choicest classical, romantic, and modernist prose was infused, much contemporary writing steers a perilous course between the schylla of stylistic fundamentalism and the charybdis of stylistic anomie. Distinguished European stylisticians such as Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, and Cixous advocate discerning (as opposed to "proper") usage predicated upon the time-honored dialectics between preservation and revolution, tradition and novelty, convention and invention, the mot juste and the mot extraordinaire, technical and creative diction. The exercise of polystylisticism (advocated by Nietzsche, Derrida, and Fowles) preempts permanent addiction to or dogmatic rejection of any individual aesthetic paradigms, fostering ecumenism and malleability. | |
