Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is also a founder and editor of the website Arts & Letters Daily.

Career

Dr Dutton is from Los Angeles, California. He taught at several US universities before emigrating to New Zealand: the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Dutton has worked in radio and served for seven years (1995 - 2002) as Director of Radio New Zealand.

Controversy

Dutton used his editorship of the journal Philosophy and Literature to criticise the prose styles of many literary and cultural theorists. In 1995, Bad Writing Contest criticised the prose of Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson. In 1998, the contest awarded first place to University of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a sentence which appeared in the journal Diacritics:

• The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton said, "To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it."

Butler refuted the charges of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of the New York Times and the affair briefly became a cause célèbre in the world of academic theorists. Dutton then ended the contest.

External links

• Denis Dutton's Personal Website
• Arts & Letters Daily