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Judith-Botler

Judith Botler is a Twitter bot made with a simple Tracery script in order to parody opaque academic writing. I carefully curated the syntactic structures and lexicon to generate sentences that can be likened to the award-winning language featured in the unofficial "Bad Writing Contest" that ran from 1995 to 1998 (see http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm). Judith Butler, whom the bot is named after, is a well-respected, leading scholar in her field, and this bot is intended only as parody.

The sentences generated by the bot are constructed to sound and feel grammatical. At the same time, the language is purposefully abstract, rendering them virtually meaningless. For example, a sentence generated on September 5, 2019, reads: "Power is alienation; one is required to phenomenologically reconstruct the theory of unconditioned identity that lives through abstract repression" (see https://twitter.com/BotlerJudith/status/1169679010160369664). In comparison, humans have produced language like this as well. In 1995, Paul Fry wrote the following sentence in his book A Defense of Poetry (Stanford University Press): "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness — rather than the will to power — of its fall into conceptuality."

Judith has been tweeting intellectual gibberish twice a day since March 13, 2019. Please visit her page at https://twitter.com/BotlerJudith.

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Judith Botler is a Twitter bot that parodies opaque academic writing.

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