Discovering a writer’s voice

Author(s):  
Julie Cigman
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Author(s):  
Elena A. Fedorova

In his novels, Dostoevsky refers to the Pushkin text to describe characters. For Dostoev­sky, Pushkin is an ethical and aesthetic touchstone; the writer’s voice is consonant with that of the poet’s persona. In some cases, the Pushkin text is embedded in religious discourse (the parable of the prodigal son). In interpreting the Pushkin text, Dostoevsky’s characters present and disclose themselves. The ‘dreamer’ from ‘White Nights’ invokes the Pushkin text to con­vey the values of his own. In her peculiar account of the ‘poor knight’ ballad, Aglaya is trans­forming religious discourse into aesthetic and mundane. Pushkin’s St Petersburg text, whose sign is wet snow, creates the space in which contradiction-ridden Hermann (The Queen of Spades) and Dostoevsky’s paradoxalists develop. The Pushkin code in Dostoevsky’s texts is what the images of characters are built on. It is a text-producing and plot-building technique and an element of literary discourse, of author-reader interactions. These techniques are used by Vladimir Nabokov in Despair and “The Visit to the Museum”.


RELC Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yin Ling Cheung ◽  
Tze Hui Low

This article examines how writer’s voice is constructed in argumentative essays written at the pre-university level. The study focusses on the student writers’ control over evaluative resources that influence the realization of voice in the high-scoring and low-scoring scripts. Using the APPRAISAL system in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study shows how voice is construed through APPRAISAL theory in the high-scoring and low-scoring general paper essays, respectively. The differences between the two categories of essays can be seen in the application of ENGAGEMENT, ATTITUDE, and GRADUATION resources. Findings indicated that the high scoring essays used richer ENGAGEMENT and ATTITUDE resources to accomplish more mature and sophisticated argumentative voices. These opportunities to make full use of the APPRAISAL resources were missed by the low-scoring students in their argumentative writing. The findings are pedagogically useful for writing teachers who find the notion of voice too abstract to teach but accept its significance in producing a good essay.


2008 ◽  

Recent years have seen the publication of a great deal of the work of Ruggero Jacobbi, a legendary figure of Italian twentieth-century culture, thanks to a praiseworthy retrieval of unpublished material conserved in the «A. Bonsanti» contemporary archive of the Gabinetto «G.P. Vieusseux». However, despite so many new pages of poetry and translation, what was still lacking was the writer's voice. The voice which, thanks to the painstaking work of Eleonora Pancani, we can now read (if not hear), as with characteristic dexterity it intermingles verses and music, literature and theatre, politics and entertainment. Ruggero Jacobbi alla radio presents the transcription of several radio programmes of the 70s featuring the genial culture of this multi-faceted intellectual. Jacobbi entertains his audience, discorsing on literary history, the figurative arts and opera, quoting poetry, discussing plays, mingling observations on Goldoni, Pirandello, Bontempelli, Savinio, Pessoa and García Lorca in an engaging anecdotal style that involves the cinema, the theatre and literature, while the great figures of tradition and recent history are interwoven with reminiscences of private life.


RELC Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nugrahenny T. Zacharias

The construction and development of a writer’s voice is a concept that continues to be of interest when teaching multilingual writing. Studies of voice construction of multilingual student writers have generally focussed on the linguistic aspects of voice construction, but are relatively limited in demonstrating the ways in which these students negotiate classroom pedagogy to construct and develop an academic voice (Tardy, 2016). Using a Bakhtinian view of voice as dialogic, the current study explores the development of voice construction of one Chinese international student (CIS) called Shan (a pseudonym) and to what extent her voice was shaped by the mediational tools employed in the classroom. I draw on a narrative analysis framework which provides a systematic tool for exploring one student’s voice construction and development when writing an argumentative paper. The analysis of Shan’s narrative illustrates the significant role of classroom pedagogy to the way Shan developed an academic voice. Pedagogical implications of the study are given at the end of the article.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-140
Author(s):  
Claudia Desblaches

This article aims at investigating the indeterminate voices in the short prose of Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Eakins and Barry Hannah. Thus, it focuses on the ‘acousmatic voice’ of O’Connor’s prose: all the hidden sounds, noises and silences that reveal more than the overt narrative voice and trigger a hermeneutic response from the reader. In relation to Patricia Eakins’s short stories, the article analyses how the voice of her prose compensates for the indeterminacy of her surrealist universe. It investigates, in this respect, the musical quality of her prose as well as the poetic rhythms which help to sustain the reader’s interest and generate meaning. The voices in Barry Hannah’s post-modern prose, finally, are shown to compensate for the renowned complexity of his writing style. By analysing the specificity of each writer’s voice, this article aims to recover the unheard lost ‘voices of prose’, the mythic space of vocality which gives a vocal but mute joy to the reader.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathi Shaw

Writer's voice is a term that is used almost universally in composition instruction. Despite the widespread use of the term, there is no consensus amongst scholars with respect to a standard definition of the term. This paper offers a new conceptualization of voice with a focus on academic literacy and student writers. Through a merging of Vygotsky's theory of Inner Speech and External Thought with Bakhtin's concept of the Utterance a definition of writer's voice is proposed that honors both meaning-making and text production in academic discourse.


LOGOS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-56
Author(s):  
Jasmin Kirkbride

Following Peter Elbow’s work on ‘resonant voice’ or ‘presence’, this essay examines the seldom-explored resonance between a text and its writer in the moment of its creation. The essay asks what the boundaries and content of this space might look like, and how this knowledge might positively affect the creative product. It challenges the popular search for a writer’s ‘voice’, instead positing that each writer has a perpetually shifting internal plurality of voices, which unifies the constructivist and social constructionist views of the self. By arguing that the resonance between writer and writing is the experience of this plurality coming to harmony, the essay posits that to create such a resonance involves a balance of simultaneously relinquishing control to the internal choir and learning how to better conduct it.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document