Noel Malcolm reviews the new book by Terry Eagleton in The Daily Telegraph and hits several nails on the head when it comes to his assessment of sludge of verbiage that passes for academic discourse. (Can't say if he's right or wrong about Eagleton's book, not having read it yet.)
Go to your nearest academic bookshop and look at the section labelled “Cultural Studies” . . . If you open these books and try reading a page or two, you will probably notice one more thing: most of them are unreadable. The reason for this is not that the authors are generally stupid or uneducated – rather the opposite. These are clever people who have spent years mastering bodies of theory and styles of argument, to the point where they can produce new quantities of the same. But the overwhelming impression they give is that they are writing to impress one another, not to enlighten you or me . . . something has gone terribly wrong. Not only have these clever cultural theorists ended up producing stuff which will never emancipate ordinary people, because no ordinary person can read it. They have turned into cultural relativists, and given up on the whole theory of emancipation. They do not believe in a general project of freeing people from the cultural or economic forces that oppress them; they are against general projects or general values tout court.