Writing Selves in Disguise: On Reading and Writing Acknowledgements

Abstract

This article explores the flexibility and adaptability of the practice of writing acknowledgements in humanities scholarship. If this text is more than marginalia, its multiple paratextual services raise questions that largely go unaddressed. Such questions have to do with knowledge―what a writing self knows about itself, how it gets round to knowing itself for what it is, and why it feels obliged to share its discoveries in knowledge with communities that build and sustain epistemological values. A course titled “Research and Publication Ethics” for newly admitted research students in the English Department of the University of Hyderabad initiated this discussion. The responses to the following questions sometimes bordered on the meanings of the ethical as marginal to the larger concerns of publishing research. Where, to begin with, do researchers see themselves situated when they write? What motives position a voice as “authorial” at the centre while the affectational motive tosses it up to the margins? How do a writer’s prefatory remarks and remembrances, admissions of commission and omission, make for respectable reading relations? The students were fascinated by the marginalia they collected, which sometimes betrayed unsuspected meanings as acknowledgements. The difficulty of writing acknowledgements is perhaps the writing of difficulty, a realisation that led the class to see a writer as often speaking, or ventriloquising, different voices, now at the centre and now on the margins. The ethical investments made by the writing self alternate between the marginal and the paratextual when readers engage with texts designated as “acknowledgements”.