Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker
Published 1996 · 48,675 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Hallucinating Foucault to read?
Hallucinating Foucault scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Academic vocabulary inside the fiction.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Clear, controlled sentences.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Obsession and scholarship treated as the same drive.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A narrator whose research is indistinguishable from his desire.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The archive and the asylum carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Distance between his scholarly account and his conduct.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The central question stays open.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- A retrospective with embedded letters.
How Hallucinating Foucault is regarded
Hallucinating Foucault holds a literary regard score of 37 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.