ELHJ: To Be Credible or Incredible?

                Power and credibility: two concepts attached at the hip yet always seeking to be greater than each other.  We unintentionally throw ourselves into a Catch-22; we gain credibility to establish power yet seek it to become credible in our desires.  While endless sources could be plundered and scoped for this paradoxical conjoining, I have chosen to examine the English Literary History Journal (ELHJ) article “The Cosmic Synthesis in Doctor Faustus” by Robert Ornstein.  Thus, I believe Ornstein’s article shows itself as a creature of a hyper-competitive environment in the need to be a superior argument.

                Understanding the argument requires understanding the environment it was created within.  At a first glance of the ELHJ on the John Hopkins University website, the journal’s foremost concern is that “ELH publishes superior studies that interpret the conditions affecting major works in English and American literature” (John Hopkins University Press).  Three words into this description and we’ve hit a snag: superior.  We’ve stumbled upon a measurement of worth, an enigmatic concept that freezes us in our tracks.  As we read further, we are dismayed to realize the statement gives no clarity into how the journal establishes this “superiority.”  Does it mean the most creative or most provocative?  Are we judged by how comprehensive the article is, or by how many thoughts the author can fill into each sentence?  This entire page could be riddled with potential questions without receiving a single answer.  All potential contributors have to go on is this abstract concept of superiority and “wing it.”

                Given context, we can now follow Ornstein’s approach to the superiority complex.  His article on the various character relationships in Marlowe’s play is deliberative and inspires unique understandings of “King” and “Clown” characters found in numerous medieval dramas.  While I personally find some of Ornstein’s arguments to be dense and sluggish, I give him credit in using less group-specific jargon in displaying his thoughts.  Until the final two paragraphs, most of the essay appears to be standard pomp and flair, as far as University-level analyses go.  Then, from way out of left field, he busts out the big guns: “Marlowe adds new dimension to the Morality framework” (Ornstein 172).  Where the majority of the essay dealt with character development, we’ve drastically switched gears into the religious/philosophical ramifications of the play.  Even so, the status of Doctor Faustus as a Morality play has been debated for years.  Why pull this aggressive curveball?  One word: superiority.  By claiming the work creates a new level to the common understanding of Morality plays, Ornstein attempted to one-up previous notions of the drama, and obviously succeeded.

                Essentially, we find ourselves in a system that prides itself so heavily on having the most superior analyses of literature that elitism is the only mode of understanding in which these contributors work.  Rather than seek new and potentially brilliant comprehensions of texts, these authors bind themselves to dig in the same old holes, each time going “deeper” than a previous contributor.  The more we observe, the more we realize this isn’t a vehicle of expressive thought but a coliseum of words and claims.  Otherwise, we could argue the competitive work asks contributors to delve further into their arguments, creating more powerful pieces.  Also, a compelling counterargument could be made that the environment these papers exist within are a particular niche and hold themselves to a stronger standard.  Then it becomes important to ask: do these standards promote greater thought or greater limitations?

Above: Competitive authorship

-Matthew R. Otto

Banking on the Official Style

When you first begin to read "Banking on Emotion: Financial Panic and the Logic of Male Submission in the Jacksonian Gothic," you do not realize how many characteristics of the official style this scholarly article possesses. David Anthony (pictured below) penned this essay in 2004 with the intention for it to be read as an academic piece, and he riddled his article in the language of the official style. Anthony is an associate professor at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, so he is assimilated to the norm of the official style, and from his short biography on the Staff Directory of the university that “[h]is research for the past ten years or so has revolved around the related representations of manhood and money in antebellum mass culture,” so his expertise is not questionable as it covers the subject of the article. But after Anthony funds the background information for his article, it becomes apparent that he finds courage in his work.

We find that the official style plagues a frightening amount of scholarly articles--making even the most motivated student feel overwhelmed with the reading. Writers do not need to polish their articles with such flair in an effort to showcase their expertise in the matter; laymen's terms efficiently share information and meaning. But Anthony decided that to best express the first couple of pages, he needed to write in the official style. Anthony spent the first section to describe the literary style of post-antebellum--time period shortly before the American Civil War--sensationalism. After ensuring this foundation for his arguments, he was able to gain confidence in his writing.

The first sentence of the beginning paragraph begins as such (no need to read fully):

What are we to make of the panic-stricken professional male so often circulating in antebellum sensationalism? Eyes bulging, hair standing on end, often in flight from the persecutions of a malevolent (inevitably male) enemy, this figure predominates in the fiction of sensationalist writers such as George Lippard and Edgar Allan Poe, but he is also a mainstay of the seemingly limitless production during this period of pamphlet- and pulp-newspaper narratives about murder, sexual intrigue, and financial betrayal. Though easily dismissed as the debased and silly product of an incipient mass culture, this figure's ubiquitous presence and the narratives of submission and terror to which it is linked should be understood as signaling a response to the period's perilously unstable economy. Indeed, while sensationalist narratives of financial failure became increasingly common in the years following the devastating Panic of 1837, perhaps none registered so fully the social trauma brought about by the boom-and-bust economy than those depicting masculine crises of debt and financial panic. In scenes ranging from the famous encounter between the slave trader Haley and Mr. Shelby in Uncle Tom's Cabin (If you knew the man as I do, you'd think that we had had a narrow escape, Shelby tells his wife after selling Uncle Tom to pay his debts) to the many depictions of panicked debtors and persecutory creditors in urban dime novels, these stories reflect the emergence of a new form of professional masculinity, one intimately linked to the vicissitudes of a panic-prone economic market (719-720).

In taking some (in reality, a lot of since I needed to first translate the paragraph) time but without much effort, I was able to rewrite this excerpt as this:

What are we supposed to think about when looking at the professional man in antebellum sensationalism literature? Eyes bulging, hair standing on end, and often escaping from a (inevitably male) enemy, this sort of man dominates in fictional writing of said time. He is also always included in the hugely popular pamphlets and pulp-newspapers about murder, sex, and financial misfortunes during this time. This figure is easily assumed to be the funny creation of a young culture, but the figure's ability to be present in any and all situations and the writings of his submission and terror should be understood as a description of the unstable economy of the country at the time. After the Panic of 1837, sensationalist narratives of financial failures became very popular, but the most common financial narrative was that of the unfortunate man who experiences debt and money loss. Scenes that feature characters like these include the encounter of the slave trader Haley and Mr. Shelby in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as well as others that depict panicked debtors and harsh creditors. These sensationalist stories depict the appearance of a new kind of professional man in the changing economy.

An enormously helpful hint for academic research is to read the first paragraph and determine if its preview holds the information you need. The original introduction is thick and fattened with large words and intellectual terms, making a preliminary reading difficult to complete in a timely manner. But the translated excerpt is much easier to comprehend and glance at quickly. The calculations for the two excerpts are: original-18.5 grade level, Flesch-Kincaid Reading ease 21.9; revision- 14.1 grade level, Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease 39. These differences show that with a limited word and sentence lengths, fewer jargons, adjectives and adverbs, and less "fillers," this article could have been written in a less complicated way. (Actually, I was able to rewrite the first three paragraphs using this scope of thinking, and I was able to express the same ideas with a lower grade level equivalency.)

With a relief though, Anthony does not suffocate his article with such an intense amount of the official style. He appears to find ease in communicating his ideas and arguments after founding facts in his piece. After suffering a few pages of torturous official style (euphemisms, abundances of adverbs and adjectives, long words and sentences, and ideas that seemed to circle around endlessly), we finally see Anthony's piece pull together in a much more concise and comprehensible article.

The essay now features Anthony's evidence to his argument--the thesis that all professional men in antebellum sensationalism are exhibited as panicked and prone to financial failure. Anthony gives material evidence to this idea, citing books and written pieces from this period that support his thesis. For example, Anthony writes:

The images of ‘‘exacting’’ market desire and debtor ‘‘servitude’’ help explain why, especially in the wake of the 1837 Panic, the debtor male is so often represented in terms of a radical state of disempowerment and dependency. Again and again within the post-Panic fictions of debtor masculinity, a central trope is a male protagonist enmeshed in a bewildering chain of random and often anonymous economic relations. In Frederick Jackson’s The Victim of Chancery, or, A Debtor’s Experience (1841), for example, a debtor named Mr. Adams, described as ‘‘one among the great number who in the year 1837 were fated, by means not within their control, to meet a reverse in their worldly circumstances,’’ is thrown into debtors prison for money owed to a network of often unknown creditors, including the aptly named Mr. Gouge and Mr. Heartless.18 Similarly, in Timothy Shay Arthur’s Debtor and Creditor: A Tale of the Times (1851), the financier Turner buys up the debts that the honest Coleman owes to a creditor named Everton, obtaining the legal right to persecute Coleman and his family mercilessly (724).

Does this passage sound more straight-forward? Easier to read and comprehend in one attempt? This is because Anthony does not feel the need to hide behind smart-speak because he is confident that his thesis is well supported by these pieces of evidence. He thinks he needs to write his ideologies in a flourish. But Anthony reverts back to the official style on the next page. He writes, making an analysis of the historical background to link back to his ideas:

The masculine disempowerment depicted in such texts found especially complex expression in antebellum forms of gothic sensationalism. Usually involving elaborate plots centered around confidence men and forged bank notes, disputes over property and inheritance, and violent (often ghostly) encounters between persecutory creditors and paranoid debtors, the antebellum gothic, more than any other mode of the period’s sensationalism, emphasizes a world given over to the radical immateriality of the paper economy. Simultaneously, it offers as the embodiment of these issues a male subject seeking emotional stability and self-possession in fiscal security (a kind of personal gold standard) who finds himself dispossessed and haunted by the uncanny spectral world of the Jacksonian marketplace. This gothic masculinity is captured usefully in an anti-Jackson lithograph by Edward Williams Clay in which commerce itself is represented as a ghostly return of the repressed (725).

This section has its official style spread on thickly, making the transition from a concise, smooth section to one that is difficult to read and digest by the average college student. 

The nature of this article--the stylist norm of a literary character--is found quite often in a collegial setting. A student in this setting might find it a useful source when forming their thesis or essay, but its reading level may be above this suggested demographic. The article in its entirety was calculated and its results are as follows: Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, 36.9 (best understood by university graduates); average grade level, 14.8. But Anthony wrote this article for a literary journal for his peers to read, so including official style in this context is acceptable because it is expected of the intended audience to be able to comprehend this essay easily. His readers might not be, though. 

In finishing the article, Anthony continues to wane in and out of the official style, repressing the urge to use intellectual wording when his confidence in his support and development fail him. But he falters in his efforts, and Anthony loses his connection to his unintended audience as his language wavers between the official style and plain language.

By Melissa Holen

Exposing Yourself One Signature at a Time

Gunderson Lutheran Hospital is responsible for the authorial and publishing duties of “Notice of Privacy Practices,” their informed consent pamphlet. In it is a section titled: “For Healthcare Operations,” which is the focus of this critique. The section contains a list of all the reasons the hospital may use your information in regards to healthcare operations. All of it is beneficial to patients and services, but if you were to read the sentence: “We may use or disclose, as needed, your health information for certain administrative, financial, legal, quality assessment and improvement, accreditation, credentialing services and training activities,” it may feel otherwise. It feels daunting and ludicrous that a hospital would need your information for all of that. The rest of the paragraph fleshes out what this first sentence means, but the fingerprints of the Official Style have dirtied the paragraph with its reading ease level of 12.8 (this is not like golf, where lower means better, oh, and it is out of 100), its 29.8 words per sentence, and its average reading grade level of 19.6, meaning that if you are not in the midst of obtaining your doctorate, you may want to read slowly and with Google search open, just in case.  

In this specific case, the use of Official Style seems counterintuitive to what Gunderson is trying to do. The hospital wants to use patient information to improve upon programs, treatment, and their health care experience as a whole, which is evident in the passage:

“For example, we may use health information to review our treatment and services, and to evaluate the competence, qualifications and performance of our staff in caring for you. We may use health information to conduct training programs in which students, trainees or practitioners in areas of healthcare learn to practice or improve their skills.”

The information seems promising, the patient may even go, “Oh, well isn’t that nice?” But, that quotation comes very early on, being the second and third sentence of the paragraph. From here on out, though, it is a list, a list of obscure processes, using words that gloss over and do little to illuminate said processes. Two examples are, “formulary development” and “business management.” The Official Style threatens to derail the train of progress, by forcing the patient to read about every place their information may go. The patient has the right to know, but the Style is so sterile that the “it will help you in the long run” message, evident in the above passage, cannot shine through. The entire thing reads like a list of the people who have seen you naked (no matter the length of that particular list), making you feel exposed, and well…naked. Now if you absolutely have to be exposed, would you not want it to be for a purpose? What if that list also included the outcome of each instance of nakedness, instead of only just the names? “We may also disclose information to doctors, nurses, technicians, students, and other Gundersen Lutheran hospital or clinic personnel for review and learning purposes.” Why not elaborate on these learning purposes?

According to the American Medical Association, the point of informed consent is to create a communication between patient and physician, which is most likely also a goal of Gunderson Lutheran. In this case, the hospital has to communicate to the patient the various places and desks it might find its way to. “For example,” shows up twice in the only two clarifications in the entire paragraph. The use of these two words makes it seem that Gunderson Lutheran is withholding pertinent information, only allowing a glimpse of what they can do to be seen by patients. The inability to disclose all of the things your medical information will be used for hinders communication between the hospital and the patient. Also, the phrase, “we may use,” appears in the paragraph a total of four times. Robert Lanham might say that this phrase may be the perfect metronome, the dangling pocket watch, to hypnotize the reader and put them to sleep. The drowsiness affect goes against the intended outcome of the informed consent. The repetition mentioned above, and the passage’s list-like format, make for a very boring read. Oh, and don’t forget that it is a long, single paragraph. Is there any better way to make a patient zone out, or better yet, just skip it entirely? So not only can the lack of specifics (only two clarifications, remember?) make the list seem daunting, but also it is such an eye sore to even look at (and God forbid, to read) that it might not even do its job, you know, of communicating.

By law, the hospital has to spell out everything for the patient, so the governing bodies seem to have forced the hand of Gunderson Lutheran into using the Official Style. The operators of the hospital want to continue to have a job, and thus, must comply. Gunderson Lutheran wants to use your information to improve on what they do, be it through research on your condition or reason for visit or using it as training material for new staff. Informed consents are very much a legal document, which means that the Official Style is all but required. But, this necessity to use the Style severs the communication between hospital and patient that is stressed by the American Medical Association. The message of the consent form, “we want to improve,” is buried underneath the Style.

The Style shuns the audience, focused, in this case, on covering legal bases. The Style should not be allowed anywhere near consent forms, forms that are supposed to promote communication. Most people are not going for their doctorate, but most people want to know what their information is being used for and why. If legal forms like this one were written with the reader, not just the judge in mind, lawyers and healthcare systems everywhere would be pleasantly surprised at the level of compliance from the intended audience, those signing their life away. Why not, at the end of each section, tell the patient who they can go to with questions, questions that may be specific to their particular experience. If these ideas are kept in mind, communication would be repaired, and the beneficence (a component of ethics!) that is trying to be conveyed via the consent form would be not only present, but visible.  

This pamphlet can be acquired by either asking for one in person at Gunderson Lutheran, or having them mail a copy to your residence. 

--Chad Nickerson