The I as the Eye: on Poetics of Ruins in I. Brodsky’s essay Homage to Marcus Aurelius

The main aim of this chapter is to offer a possible interpretation of the meanings attached to the ruins as both the image and the metaphor in Brodsky’s essays, or, to be more precise, in “Homage to Marcus Aurelius” (1994), an essay that sets its narrative world in the ruined world that surrounds the narrator, elicits an ambivalent sense of time, and provokes complex thoughts of history as an eternal cycle and dialectic process. Departing from the premises that ruins emancipate us from social constraints, free senses, and desires, enable introspection, and foster creativity, I expand the well-established thesis according to which Brodsky’s writings are structured on an image of time as irretrievability and irreclaimability, which, in his writings, reverberates and re-creates an experience of continuous failures to discipline the memory, thus making any return impossible. Moreover, my aim is to show that the approach to Brodsky’s essays from the perspective of an analysis of ruins can offer us much more: for example, it can offer valuable insights into his understanding of the agency of the authorial modernist voice in literature. Where, in a work of art, is the writer’s voice located? What does it mean to see and to write, and what does it mean to read? What role, in this process, is assigned to tradition, “eternal values,” and cultural heritage?

Cohesive Plurality

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.

Pushkin texts in the description of characters by Dostoevsky and Nabokov

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”.

Voice Construction and Development of a Multilingual Student Writer: A Bakhtinian Perspective

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.

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.

Criteria and Scale for Argumentation

This paper presents an updated and practical criteria and scale for teaching, learning, and evaluating argumentation. The ability criteria and scale is generated from existing knowledge of argumentation as expected by CEFR, TOEFL and IELTS, as well as recent interest in argumentation. Examination of the academic literature suggests that the new criteria and scale should consider relevancy, reasoning, language use, organization and writer’s voice. Relevancy has not yet been seriously highlighted in the existing criteria. Reasoning, language use and organization are common criteria in argumentation. Writer’s voice is not emphasized in the existing criteria but often discussed in recent publications on argumentation. It is added to the updated framework in this paper to keep up with advancements in the field. This new framework could be a powerful option for teaching, learning and evaluating argumentation particularly in EFL or ESL contexts.

WRITERS’ VOICE AND ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN STUDENTS’ ANALYTICAL EXPOSITION TEXTS

One criterion of a good analytical exposition lies in the writers’ ability to present a clear position and show their voice in their writing. Such quality can be achieved through skillful use of Engagement resources which allow writers to state their voice by aligning or disaligning it with those of others in presenting their case. Involving nine analytical exposition texts written by university students of different proficiency levels, this study explores how the writers’ voice (Hyland, 2008) is constructed through Engagement resources. Drawing on Martin and White’s Engagement system (Martin & White, 2005), the study reveals that, while all of the students are capable of presenting a clear position, students of different proficiency levels indicate different engagement strategies in their writing. Students who are more proficient in English are able to more successfully exploit the resources necessary for constructing a well-argued text and show a stronger sense of authorship. This study is expected to give insights into the use of Engagement resources in developing the writer’s voice in texts written by EFL writer learners in the Indonesian context.