Difficult style and "Illustrious" vernaculars : a historical perspective / Margaret Ferguson -- Hume's learned and conversible worlds / Robin Valenza and John Bender -- Bad writing and good philosophy / Jonathan Culler -- The metaphysics of clarity and the freedom of meaning / John McCumber -- Feminism's broken English / Robyn Wiegman -- The resistance of theory ; or, The worth of agony / Rey Chow -- Styles of intellectual publics / Michael Warner -- On difficulty, the avant-garde, and critical moribundity / Peter Brooks -- Difficulty in modern poetry and aesthetics / Robert Kaufman -- Bad writing / Barbara Johnson -- The morality of form, or, What's "bad" about "bad writing"? / David Palumbo-Liu -- The politics of the production of knowledge : an interview with Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak / Stuart J. Murray -- Values of difficulty / Judith Butler.