Academic titling run amok

Put away your pens, humanities professors, turn off Microsoft Word, stop trying to come up with ever-more-clever placement of parentheses in your article titles: Phil Smith, a professor of special education at Eastern Michigan University, is the runaway winner of the "Best/Worst Postmodern Title in Recent Memory" award. Smith takes the coveted honor (by blogosphere acclamation) for an article he wrote for the journal Qualitative Inquiry last year that pretty much retires the genre:

an ILL/ELLip(op)tical po - ETIC/EMIC/Lemic/litic post® uv ed DUCAT ion recherché repres©entation

Some readers smelled a parody, but that doesn't seem to be quite what Professor Smith is up to. Wade into the jargon of the abstract and it would appear that Smith does want to throw darts at the reigning ways social scientists talk about their research. But his target would seem to be conventionally boring ways of writing about social science, rather than conventionally boring PoMo ways of doing so:

[T]his writ(h)ing outlines, through a flagrantly and literally/littorally entirely tiresome, unspeakably visual and aural word conflagration, a po-etic that begins to de-inscribe the nature of metaphoric, medicalized, ventriloquizing, normative discourse of social science/education.

"Literally/littorally"? Really? It seems clear -- though nothing else does -- that Smith doesn't talk that way in person. On the always-reliable Ratemyprofessors.com, he gets a Clarity rating from Eastern Michigan students of 4.4 out of 5.0.

Via The Valve.

PS. At Savage Minds, a commenter notes that the html code used by blogs (including this one) is no match for the typography of that awesome title. For an even more accurate rendition of what readers of the journal saw, look here.