Voices Of Writers Research Articles

THE VIEW FROM THE EAST ON THE PROBLEM FIELD OF WESTERN LITERARY AND THEORETICAL STU

The study aims to determine the status of modern theoretical literary debate within the context of scientific theorizing in China and Japan. Growing understanding of the crisis of Euro-Atlantic literary-theoretical thought in the first two decades of the 21st century took shape in the publication of works by venerable specialists in the field of literary studies devoted to the causes of its occurrence and the taxonomy of directions and theoretical tools to overcome it. What unites this whole corpus of extensive research is an indirect or direct recognition of the decline of productive literary theoretical research, which came after the literary theoretical breakthrough of the late 60s of the 20th century. At the same time, the refusal to recognize Western literature as a model, artistic and aesthetic norm caused the emergence of powerful voices of authors whose writings are not directly shaped by the Western literary canon. Simultaneously, the refusal to recognize Western literature as a model, artistic and aesthetic norm caused the emergence of powerful voices of writers whose work is not directly shaped by the Western literary canon. The polemic started with the postcolonial discourse regarding the epistemological perspectives of Western literary theory in a situation of clash with a non-Western literary text, which, at the turn of the 21st century, developed into a reflection of its ontological potential. Both intellectuals and artists of the age of Multiculturalism, who relied on the Poststructuralist “breakthrough to the transcendental” on the one hand and on the philosophical nature as well as poetics and aesthetics of art of the East on the other, demonstrated that a complex of issues related to the future existence of literary theory risen by the literature itself, is much more sophisticated. First of all, these processes are caused by the early formation of new future horizons of world literature, in which artists with Eastern artistic and aesthetic background and knowledge play a major role. Following the mastering of the Western literary and aesthetic canon – rather a long period when the writings of these authors were derived from the general paradigm of Western literature – the formation of a new literature takes place, protesting Bhabha’s idea of mimicry as a way of survival and adaptation of the colonized and demonstrating the non-Western canon as its artistic source. The era of posttheory should testify that the rumours of the “death of the theory” may be greatly exaggerated in case the overcoming crisis of theory, which is based on literary knowledge originating from the East.

The writer's voice repertoire: Exploring how health researchers accomplish a distinctive 'voice' in their writing.

Much published research writing is dull and dry at best, impenetrable and off-putting at worst. This state of affairs both frustrates readers and impedes research uptake. Scientific conventions of objectivity and neutrality contribute to the problem, implying that 'good' research writing should have no discernible authorial 'voice'. Yet some research writers have a distinctive voice in their work that may contribute to their scholarly influence. In this study, we explore this notion of voice, examining what strong research writers aim for with their voice and what strategies they use. Using a combination of purposive, snowball and theoretical sampling, we recruited 21 scholars working in health professions education or adjacent health research fields, representing varied career stages, research paradigms and geographical locations. We interviewed participants about their approaches to writing and asked each to provide one to three illustrative publications. Iterative data collection and analysis followed constructivist grounded theory principles. We analysed interview transcripts thematically and examined publications for evidence of the writers' described approaches. Participants shared goals of a voice that was clear and logical, and that engaged readers and held their attention. They accomplished these goals using approaches both conventional and unconventional. Conventional approaches included attention to coherence through signposting, symmetry and metacommentary. Unconventional approaches included using language that was evocative (metaphor, imagery), provocative (pointed critique), plainspoken ('non-academic' phrasing), playful (including humour) and lyrical (attending to cadence and sound). Unconventional elements were more prominent in non-standard genres (e.g. commentaries), but also appeared in empiric papers. What readers interpret as 'voice' reflects strategic use of a repertoire of writing techniques. Conventional techniques, used expertly, can make for compelling reading, but strong writers also draw on unconventional strategies. A broadened writing repertoire might assist health professions education research writers in effectively communicating their work.

Perceptions of authorial voice: Why discrepancies exist

Although theoretical conceptions of voice vary, researchers now generally agree on its amalgamated and dialogical nature, highlighting the interplay among the reader, the writer, and the text (Canagarajah, 2015; Matsuda, 2015). While much research has investigated the elements of the writer and the text in voice construction, far less has examined voice reconstruction from readers’ perspectives. The current study therefore explores reader reconstruction of writer voice, focusing particularly on understanding the phenomenon of discrepant voice perceptions by different readers. Two raters double-rated 65 EFL essays, simulating the conventional writing assessment practice. Independent-samples t tests on various linguistic indices across essays that received consistent vs. inconsistent voice ratings were carried out to identify linguistic elements that might be sources of inconsistency in raters’ voice perceptions. Semi-structured rater interview was conducted to both triangulate quantitative findings and explore other potential sources of inconsistency. Results showed that most of the language features did not seem to be associated with discrepant voice perceptions, but raters’ differing perceptions of the effectiveness of certain language elements, essay structure, and idiosyncratic interpretations of certain evaluative criteria might lead to divergent reconstructions of voice. Implications were discussed to inform L2 writing assessment, pedagogy, and future research. • A mixed methods design was used to investigate discrepant voice reconstructions. • Most of the language features did not contribute to inconsistent voice ratings. • Raters were interviewed to identify other potential sources of inconsistency. • Factors at linguistic and organizational levels might lead to inconsistent ratings. • The rubric might have also played a role in discrepant evaluations of voice.

Breathing our way into mindful academic writing: a collaborative autoethnography of an online writing community

ABSTRACT Although literature demonstrates that mindfulness practices enhance undergraduate student learning, writing composition, and sense of well-being in higher education, there is minimal research that explores faculty and doctoral student engagement in mindfulness practices to support academic writing and build online writing community. In this collaborative autoethnographic study, we fill this gap by exploring our experiences as five female academics participating in an online mindful writing group where we gathered regularly to meditate and write throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We developed and engaged in innovative meditations designed to support our academic writing and writer identity. Data included individual position statements and reflections and group conversational interviews. The findings are clustered under three main themes: (a) deepened understanding of the writing process and writer identity as expressions of self-reflection, creativity, and joy that led to greater acceptance of ourselves and others as writers, (b) the role of mindfulness in academic writing as present-moment non-judgemental awareness and acceptance that promoted well-being, and (c) development of a mindful online writing community that provided a space for honesty, vulnerability, knowledge exchange, and knowledge creation. We identified tensions of collaborative writing, such as navigating different writing styles, negotiating writer voice, and interpreting asynchronous feedback. We recommend that universities support the development of online mindfulness-based writing communities and pedagogies recognising that faculty and doctoral students vary in their continuum of mindfulness practices and, thus, are likely to hold different expectations from such communities.

Inviting individual voice to second language academic writing

Abstract Our purpose in this paper is to present the findings of a study aimed at investigating how second language (L2) student-writers construct their identities as academic authors in tertiary education. We consider the restraints institutionalized text production can place on the constitution of writer identity, and call for pedagogical approaches to writing to take on board our findings to better help students in the process of finding their unique authorial voice. While the specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts within which people write limit possibilities for their self-representation, we argue that student writers should be encouraged to bring their own life histories and sense of the self to their texts. The study follows the notion of writer voice as proposed by Lehman (2018). She proposes categorising writer voice into three main types: individual, collective and depersonalized. As these three aspects of voice are predominantly cued through metadiscourse features we employed a three-dimensional analytic rubric designed by Lehman (2018) in order to identify and analyze the potential of individual voice in the facilitation and enhancement of academic writing in a second language (see Lehman, 2018).

Rilkes Korrespondenzen ed. by Alexander Honold und Irmgard M. Wirtz

Reviewed by: Rilkes Korrespondenzen ed. by Alexander Honold und Irmgard M. Wirtz Robert Weldon Whalen Alexander Honold und Irmgard M. Wirtz, eds., Rilkes Korrespondenzen. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019. 285 pp. After all these years, nearly a century since his death, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) still fascinates. An impressionist, a symbolist, a kind of Central European Oscar Wilde, Rilke was the very archetype of the fin-de-siècle early [End Page 102] modern aesthete. He was also astonishingly industrious. Famous as a poet, he was also a playwright. He wrote prose fiction, criticism, reviews, and reportage. He devoted great care to his diaries. And he wrote heaps of letters. As Alexander Honold and Irmgard M. Wirtz note in the text reviewed here, one can rightly speak of Rilkes immense collection of letters as itself a kind of literary work, a "Werk neben dem Werk" or a "Werk im Werk" (7). The Literaturarchiv of the Swiss National Library in Bern holds a fine collection of Rilkes letters, and in 2017, it hosted a colloquium devoted to Rilkes correspondence. The fourteen essays in Rilkes Korrespondenzen, edited by Alexander Honold und Irmgard M. Wirtz, were contributions to that colloquium. The essays explore not only Rilkes life and work but also the wider category of letters-as-literature. Yes, letters can provide more or less accurate information about a letter writer's thoughts, mood, and whereabouts, and historians have long relied on them as primary sources. Letters, though, are funny things, as Honold and Wirtz point out in their article, "Rilkes Korrespondenzen: Das Briefwerk als Medium kommunikativer Selbstentwürfe und literarischer Interaktion." There is, of course, the odd time lag in letter writing; the recipient receives the letter sometime after the writer has written it, such that the meanings the recipient reads are, like starlight finally reaching earth, asynchronous, and in the interval, all sorts of things can intrude. By the time the recipient receives the letter and learns what the writer thinks, the writer may well be thinking something else. Lessing encouraged people to write the way they spoke, and letters might well reflect the writer's voice, but the language of letters is sometimes as fictive as fiction. Writers craft their letters to suit the recipients; a letter, especially in Rilkes case, might well reflect one of the several different Rilkes flowing within Rilke. Moreover, letters, whatever the writer's intent, might also reflect both the cultural assumptions of the day and the specific literary conventions of the time. It is no easy thing reading another's mail. The essays in Rilfces Korrespondenzen examine all these complexities. All are acutely sensitive to the letters' language. Jörg Schuster, in his "Brief-Bewegungen: Rainer Maria Rilkes Epistolographie," for instance, notes how often metaphors of movement appear in some of Rilkes letters and the ways these metaphors reflect Rilkes wider concerns. Several essays examine Rilkes correspondence with specific people—Alexander Honold, in "Ein Durchgang, kein Haus: Rilkes Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé als Reflexionsmedium einer transitorischen Alltäglichkeit," and Torsten [End Page 103] Hoffmann, in "'Aber ich bin ein Ungeschickter des Lebens': Figuren des Scheiterns in Rilkes Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé," discuss Rilkes complicated relationship with the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salomé. Women played a key role in Rilkes life, and Manfred Koch, in "Vom Werk des Gesichts zum Herzwerk," looks at Rilke's correspondence with Magda von Hattingberg; Gesine Bey in "'Dort, in der Buchhandlung, traf ich. . . eine seltsame Frau,'" discusses Rilke and Angela Guttmann; Ilma Rakusa, in "Marina Zwetajewas Beziehung zu Rainer Maria Rilke," considers Rilkes relationship with Marina Zwetajewa; and Brigitte Duvillard, in "Die Korrespondenz zwischen Rainer Maria Rilke und Marietta de Courten: Inventar der Briefe," writes about Rilke and Marietta de Courten. Christoph König, in « 'Faites la récolte, la première récolte d'amour,' » provides an overview of Rilkes rich correspondence with women and the role that correspondence played in Rilkes poetry. Letters not only illuminate relations with real people. Rilke was fond of using letters in fiction, as Stephan Kammer shows in "Schlechte Einheit: Zur Epistolarität des Erzählens in Rilkes Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurias Brigge" One of Rilkes most popular texts, Brief...

Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile ed. by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears

Reviewed by: Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile ed. by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears Stephanie Schechner Orlando, Valérie K., and Pamela A. Pears, eds. Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile. Lexington, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4985-6703-9. Pp. xix + 214. The chronological and international scope of this excellent book of essays is ambitious, gathering analyses of works by authors from across most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the globe. By choosing to center the volume on Paris, the editors offer what turns out to be an illusory focus in that the city functions only as a transitory point of passage, not a fixed place. For the authors discussed here, Paris is just as often a place to lose oneself as to find oneself. Many scholars have taken up the theme of exile in recent years, but this set of essays takes the reader a step further with the suggestion, made by several authors including Bernardo Toro in the interview that concludes this volume, that exile is the foundational state of all writing. Orlando and Pears have selected essays that complicate the notion of exile by expanding it to include self-exile, linguistic exile, and sexual exile among others. By not limiting exile to issues of nationality, race, or ethnicity, the editors consciously draw the reader's attention to questions of intersectionality. The editors broach this concern in the introduction, but the full impact of their choices only becomes clear as one reads the entire book, which contains essays on a diverse set of authors ranging from the more familiar like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, to lesser-known such as Elena Garro (Mexico) and Évelyne Trouillot (Haiti). One of the best essays is Alison Rice's complex study of the correspondence between Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar, two writers who resist interpretation and yet who yield fascinating insights on the question of what it means to be an outsider. Leslie Barnes's insightful analysis of Linda Lê's fiction is complemented by personal reflections on her own wanderings in Paris. Karl Ashoka Britto makes a compelling case for the inclusion of Vietnamese American authors Monique Truong and Aimee Phan, in his persuasive essay on Vietnamese diasporic fiction. Britto's essay draws connections between the French colonial and American postcolonial presence in Asia and subverts the reader's expectations of Vietnamese diasporic fiction. The volume concludes with two essays that allow the voices of writers to speak more directly either through summarized or transcribed interviews. The [End Page 257] reflections of these two authors, Louis-Philippe Dalembert (Haiti), and Bernardo Toro (Chile), close the book in a manner that highlights its far-reaching conclusions about not only the literature of exile but also literature as exile. Stephanie Schechner Widener University (PA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Autonomy in Learning English as a foreign Language : A Case Study in Writer's Voice

Autonomy in Learning English as a foreign Language : A Case Study in Writer's Voice

Introduction: Imagining Alternatives

Imagining Alternatives Megan Condis (bio) If one wants to invent something new, one first has to imagine something new. Perhaps this is why so many scientists credit speculative fiction for helping them take the first steps along their paths to discovery. Were it not for the extraordinary voyages imagined by Jules Verne, Edwin Hubble (the American astronomer who was the first to prove that there were other galaxies out there beyond the Milky Way) would have followed in the footsteps of his father and gone into a career in law.1 Were it not for Dick Tracy’s wrist radio and the slick communicators worn by Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, Martin Cooper might never have invented the cellular phone. And were it not for fantastic tales of interstellar travel and alien invasion written by H. G. Wells, Robert H. Goddard might never have invented the multistage rockets that eventually made spaceflight possible.2 Science fiction might also help readers acclimate to the uncertainties posed by the unknowable future. According to Isaac Asimov, It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is but the world as it will be. . . . Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today—but the core of science [End Page 1] fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.3 Ursula K. Le Guin takes a similar view with regard to fantasy. She notes that the genre affords its readers with “a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality.”4 In other words, far from serving as a diversion from the everyday world, fantasy can be imagined as a creative tool kit that allows readers to reconsider how the world has been built and to question whether it might be constructed differently if we are ever given the chance. It encourages a kind of literacy that allows one to go beyond the ability to “read the operating instructions,”5 literacy whose only purpose is to enable subjects to function efficiently within existing systems of labor and citizenship, and instead aims toward a critique of the status quo. In fact, in a speech that she gave at the National Book Awards in 2014, Le Guin specifically praised the ability of fantasy to help societies think through difficult social and political problems. “Hard times are coming,” she told the audience of writers, publishers, and booksellers, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. . . . We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.6 This special issue aims to further the notion that speculative fiction (including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all manner of other fantastical subgenres) has something more to offer humanity beyond mere escapism. Our contributors posit that these genres provide a unique opportunity for creators and audiences to imagine alternatives to entrenched political narratives and to the so-ordinary-as-to-seem-invisible structures of power that organize our existence. Just as a technology must be dreamed before it can be built, so must new ideologies be envisioned before they can be enacted. Indeed, one of the greatest tricks that an ideological system can pull [End Page 2] is to convince the world that it doesn’t exist, that it is simply a description of what is “normal” or “factual” or “natural” or just the way things have always been and therefore need not be examined. As José Esteban...

RAGAM GRAMATIKAL DALAM ARTIKEL ILMIAH (ACADEMIC VOICES) DI E-JOURNAL

Grammatical or sound variety in scientific writing (Academic Voices) is a method used by writers to convey their own ideas and other people's ideas in the standard of scientific writing both in the form of Writer's Voice, Direct Voice, Voice indirect (Indirect Voice), additional voice (External Voice). The purpose of this study is to improve the ability of writers about quotations, to distinguish writers' voice, direct voice, indirect voice and external voice and reduce the level of plagiarism in writing journal articles. This study uses research in the form of Electronic Literature Study (E-Library Research) using observation and documentation. The result is 90% (ninety percent) of authors use author's voice (Writer's Voice) rather than direct voice (Direct Voice), indirect voice (Indirect Voice), additional voice (External Voice) in E-journal, formality of writing style scientific works are very varied and e-mail address (e-mail) is one of the conditions for the publication of articles as scientific papers.

Specters of The Republic: the Case of Manuel Piar

The execution of General Manuel Piar in 1817 is one of the most controversial events in the early years of the Spanish American revolution. Piar, the highest-ranking pardo officer in the insurgent army, was accused of a conspiracy to kill all white criollos, destroy the republican ‘system of equality’, and seise power as a ‘tyrant’. The evidence for the conspiracy charges is widely acknowledged to be flimsy. Prior to the trial Bolívar issued a lengthy invective against Piar. A close reading of that text shows that it draws heavily on the Catiline Conspiracy, one of the best-known conspiracies of antiquity. Behind this historical pastiche, which has gone unnoticed in the substantial literature on the Piar case, we can discern echoes of the conflict between the Haitian Republic under Pétion and the secessionist monarchy under Henri Christophe, a conflict witnessed first-hand by the criollo leadership while living in exile in Haiti. Conjuring Piar as Catilina, Bolívar replaces the voices of writers who on behalf of a ‘tyrant’ claimed a position of blackness and denounced Western civilisation, with images of pillage and demagoguery.

Home imagined: Uncovering a sensuous history of people and place through eco-somatic improvisation

Abstract This article sets out to describe an eco-somatic improvisational danced encounter with the ruins of a 150-year-old migrant dwelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interwoven into the description of the project are ‘author’s notes’ as she makes links with the crisis of homelessness and displacement of refugees driven from their homes by war and famine. She asks what it means to reside, dwell or take up residence in a new place; how we might perform our belonging or our alienation; what it might mean to relocate, rebuild a sense of home and what remains of this sensory world amongst the ruins that might be uncovered through improvised dance. Finally, she suggests the ways in which intuitive danced engagement with particular space/place might reveal sensuous narratives of the past, supporting current practices of site-based intuitive somatic improvisation as valid academic practice-based research methodology. The research brings together the voices of writers from performance theory; somatics; phenomenology; social geography; architecture, archaeology and visual media; and those of the author as participant observer and the dancers as inquiring artists.

The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J. Banks

Reviewed by: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J. Banks Scott Forsyth Miranda J. Banks, The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2015) This book adds to the growing scholarly attention paid to cultural labour, to understanding creative artistic work as work, as well as art. This history of one union over more than eight decades chronicles the Screenwriters Guild, later the Writers Guild of America, the union of the Hollywood screenwriters, and, through difficult ups and downs, still one of the most important unions in the American and global media industries. It is a dramatic, even tumultuous, story, with a leadership that was often courageous and daring but also strategically wrong repeatedly and, for a long period, politically compromised and threatening to its own members. That membership was often fractious and divided, its collective interests not always clear or achievable. As workers, the writers have been continually faced with aggressive corporate antagonists, drastic corporate re-organization, and constant innovation in media technology. The terrain the union had to contest and occupy has been constantly changing and continues to do so. These features might be described for any category of worker in modern capitalism. But the writers' status as both artists and employees leads Banks to find three themes that recur, unresolved, over the decades. First, under American copyright law, ownership of work for hire resides with the corporation, not the writer, unlike for the novelist or playwright. The control of the author's work is continually a struggle. Second, this gives unusual importance to the credit on a film – who is named as author and who controls that naming is still an issue of complex negotiation. It remains as an indicator of the precarious status of the writer. Third, writers' status [End Page 283] can constantly shift. Writers were sometimes well paid insiders, close to particular producers, or even became producers. Or writers could be victimized by power or, for women and minorities, marginalized almost completely. Banks' historically ordered account covers the entire life of the union, drawing on scholarly sources on the diverse periods, the many memoirs, more than sixty new interviews, and the Guild's own History Project. In 1978, almost a hundred writers were recorded in extensive interviews about their lives as writers and the union. The project was largely forgotten and Banks uses this rich resource to great effect. Her narration is enlivened by the personal voices of writers – observant, articulate, and humorous – who lived this history. The story begins in early Hollywood, marked by paternalism and the informal organization of labour in the so-called studios, ruled by despotic moguls. It is not until 1933, in the midst of the economic crisis of the Depression and a drastic drop in Hollywood theatrical revenues, that the Screenwriters Guild declared for unionization, moving beyond its role as a social club. It was prompted by the enhanced importance of writers as the studios adapted to talking pictures and provoked by an aggressive salary-cutting campaign by the studio heads. The key leaders, many leftists and radicals among them, also saw themselves as part of the vast wave of unionization sweeping the United States by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, organizing workers who had not been unionized or just beginning to see themselves as workers. Despite the overwhelming support of the writers, it took almost a decade for the union to achieve recognition and a first contract. The studio heads regarded unionization as betrayal and fought it tooth and nail with vicious anti-union and anti-Red propaganda in the workplace and in the press. Company unions were formed. New Deal legislation that favoured unionization was challenged right up to the Supreme Court. It was only as the war began that the studios acquiesced and Hollywood became a union town. But the first contract only went so far – the writers secured jurisdiction, but failed to crack the owners' copyright control of the writers' work. Instead the union achieved minimum salaries, the Basic Minimum Agreement, and control and arbitration of on-screen credits, the key achievement for the leadership. But the failure to break...

Voice features in academic texts – A review of empirical studies

The term voice is frequently used in current writing research. This review gives an overview of empirical studies which aimed to identify voice features in academic texts written by students and/or professional writers. The purpose of this article is to show how the understanding of voice and the aims and approaches used in the studies are intertwined. Many studies build on Hyland’s (2008) interactional model which has contributed to insights into voice-related issues in academic writing. However, the overemphasis on linguistic features, such as the use of first person pronouns, entails the risk that research on voice ignores content-related features that might be more relevant in the construction of voice. In addition, this review emphasizes the need to relate voice features to the specific context where the writing occurs. The reader-based approach used in the studies by Matsuda and Tardy (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009) or the combination of different methodological tools, as used by Dressen-Hammouda (2014), allows taking into account contextual aspects such as the insider knowledge of the disciplinary community and/or the genre, thus demonstrating how the writer's voice is always embedded in ways of knowledge making and writing traditions.

Incompatible identities: Memory and experience at the National September 9/11 Memorial and Museum

The National September 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City is simultaneously a secular location and sacred place, a space for collective mourning and for individual grief. The incised identities of the diasporic 9/11 dead are displaced from loved ones and from traditional resting places for the dead. While the ephemeral presence of the deceased on the memorial site may be tangible to some, the dead will soon return to this site in the physical form of bone fragments and unidentifiable remains. What will this place then become – public place or death space, ossuary or park, or simultaneously a heterotopic realm of incompatible identities and multiple experiences? The writer's voice echoes these heterotopic tensions; the presence of the subjective voice struggles with the vividness of a ‘prosthetic’ attachment to the events of 9/11 and the scholarly voice struggles to attain a critical distance from the event. From these seemingly incompatible perspectives, a middle ground is negotiated by embedding an autoethnographical perspective, allowing for reflection upon the implications of the return of the dead to the heart of the living city upon practices of death and grief, of memory and experience, of mourning and of everyday life.

Writer's Voice in My Children! My Africa!

Writer's Voice in My Children! My Africa!

The storied South: voices of writers and artists

The storied South: voices of writers and artists

The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists by William Ferris (review)

The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists by William Ferris (review)

Book Review: The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, by Victor S. Navasky and Evan Cornog (Eds.)

Victor S. Navasky and Evan Cornog (Eds.). The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 179 pp.This is a collection of twelve lectures directed to graduate students in a magazine concentration at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism from 2002 to 2010. The goal of the lectures, according to the authors, is to provide into the world of magazines by way of the perspectives of those who write, publish, edit, and design them. The speakers are some of the biggest names in the magazine world from the past 30 years, among them John Gregory Dunne, Tina Brown, Ruth Reichl, and Michael Kelly.The content of the twelve chapters deals with writing for magazines (one chapter), the editors' perspective (six chapters), copyediting and fact checking (two chapters), dealing with art directors (one chapter), and publishers' perspective (two chapters).Columbia is uniquely situated for such a lecture series as it can draw on the wealth of local talent from the very top of the magazine profession-people who have been movers, shakers, and decision makers at some of the most significant magazines of the twentieth century. These include the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Gourmet, Elle, New York, and others. The Art of Making Magazines, according to the authors, is not a how-to book, but a how-to-think-about-it book (p. viii). It is not a step-by-step manual for creating a magazine, but rather a collection of tips and advice about the politics, philosophies, ethics, and battles involved in the high stakes business of large magazines. Another analogy used by the authors in describing the is that of a quilt of perspectives and backgrounds (p. viii).Like any collection of lectures, the is indeed a crazy quilt in that the chapters could stand alone; however, they are linked by certain threads. Given that the speakers are top professionals from elite magazines speaking to students in an elite program, weighty emphasis is placed on the value of magazine journalism practiced at this level. Many of the lecturers fill their comments with war stories about their experiences get- ting into the business and making their way up the ladders of staff boxes, moving from one big magazine to another. They tell name-dropping anecdotes and detail their strug- gles in the service of publishing the very best writers. But a certain amount of this is to be expected from such a collection of professionals, and most of the stories are exceptionally well told. These are after all, writers and editors. Many worked on mag- azines during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s and recall a sense of romance about the vitality and excitement of creating a product put together with style and verve.In every chapter, however, there is some special insight or some particular word of inspiration or caution that is a valuable take-away, no matter the reader's level of writing, editing, or publishing. John Gregory Dunne, for example, whose piece is the first and the longest in the book, stresses the importance of the writer's voice, developed from his or her own background. …

Titles Я Us!

Using “Titles Я Us!” as a metaphor, I explore the case that when academics choose titles for their texts, they also reveal something about who they are. First, I briefly discuss the theory of titles—“titology”—as paratexts and pre-texts. Second, I identify several categories of title. Third, I analyze five recently published articles as mini-case studies and question whether they reveal anything useful about writer stance and writer voice. Finally, I conclude that titles are not only thresholds into what academics write but also into what and who they are.