English Text Construction - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2008

The concept of voice has become central to studies of discourse, composition, and literature, but in this paper I want to shift its meaning a little to explore an area where voice is thought to play only a minor role: that of academic writing. I intend here to explore the idea of ‘disciplinary voice’ by focusing on the interpersonal features of academic writing and elaborating how writers position themselves and their readers. Essentially, I believe the idea of voice can shed light on aspects of disciplinary argument and am interested to see what these features tell us about writers’ notions of appropriate relationships and what this means for writing in the disciplines. I will begin by looking briefly at the notion of voice, and go on to sketch an interactional model based on the ideas of stance, or how writers convey their attitudes and credibility, and engagement, or the ways they bring their readers into the discourse. I will then show how the choices writers make from these systems construct authorial voice, academic arguments, and the disciplines themselves.

The role of passive voice as a device used in medical and scientific discourse to mystify the author is clearly articulated and well-known. Through analysis of the Methods section of nine medical research articles, this paper shows that metonymy is another frequently used impersonalisation strategy in medical discourse. Furthermore, this paper argues that impersonalisation is not restricted to the authors and that two types of impersonalisation need be distinguished: generalisation and socialisation. Discourse agents were categorised into the ‘present authors’ versus ‘other researchers and health professionals not part of the research team’. Agents were investigated in relation to impersonalisation and social identity. Results show that possessive/causative metonyms are used to produce genderless, generic ‘present authors’ as well as ‘other researchers’. In contrast, more significant ‘health professionals’ are often referred to in terms of representational/locative metonyms highlighting their authoritative social identity. The study also shows that for these non–authorial professionals co-occurrence of metonymy and passive voice is generally avoided. Although ‘present authors’ are mainly absent, this analysis reveals a higher than expected author presence resulting in a significantly higher degree of impersonalisation for non-authorial agents.

The study reported on in this paper uses corpus data in order to examine how upper-intermediate to advanced EFL learners from a wide range of mother tongue backgrounds perform a number of rhetorical functions particularly prominent in academic discourse, and how this compares with native academic writing. In particular, it is shown that one of the problems experienced by EFL learners is that they tend to use features that are more typical of speech than of academic prose, which suggests that they are largely unaware of register differences. Four possible explanations are offered to account for this register confusion, namely the influence of speech, L1 transfer, teaching-induced factors and developmental factors.

In present-day English, well and now function as pragmatic markers with a wide range of text-structuring and interpersonal meanings. Both markers are used as topic-changers and serve as a means to signal speaker-attitudes or to gain a shared level of understanding between speaker and addressee on the interpersonal level. Whereas well is generally back-looking, now directs the hearer to the upcoming topic (e.g. Aijmer 2002). Because well and now have developed from a similar — adverbial — origin, this paper will examine to what extent the propositional source of the two markers serves a role in their later semantic-pragmatic development. Our aim is to examine, by means of a historical corpus study, to what extent the development of well and now has been directed by underlying theories of grammaticalisation — implying semantic bleaching and pragmatic strengthening — and (inter)subjectification (Traugott 1999). Specific attention will be paid to contexts in which speaker and addressee have diverging views and where the use of a pragmatic marker can help in expressing personal stance and in creating interpersonal ties with the addressee. The material for this paper is taken from three historical corpora which contain speech-based data, viz. the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC), the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Sampler) (CEECS), and the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED).

In its theoretical framework, my paper participates in the debate over voice ‘after’ Derrida. Drawing on poststructuralist and phenomenological approaches as well as recent contributions in the area of performance and cultural studies, I claim that the voice can be treated as an effect of resonance. Inherently performative and dialogic, the voice emerges by resonating with something else as well as by effecting resonances elsewhere. In Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), this figuration is epitomized by the charismatic speaker Verena Tarrant. Her extraordinary public voice is read, manipulated and spoken by various figures of authority, who treat her as a stake in their struggle for power and publicity. Possessed by her vocal gift, they seek in turn to take possession of it. Yet while she lends her voice to others by echoing their ideas and phrases, catchwords and clichés, Verena simultaneously produces an impact on her audiences which eludes full appropriation. Her impersonal voice may express neither self-presence nor agency, but its effect is one of powerful resonance. Exceeding the text’s satire of the feminist movement and publicity culture, Verena’s doubly mesmeric voice refers us to an ambiguous and unresolvable fascination, both highlighted and performed by The Bostonians, for the voice in general and the public voice of modernity in particular.

This article examines the way in which the use of effects of orality in fiction by Caribbean novelists makes possible a re-examination of the assumptions underlying the use of voice in fiction. By looking at definitions of voice proposed by twentieth-century critics and exploring the ambiguity that underlies the metonymic extension of the term to designate the voice that is ‘heard’ in a written text, we attempt to show that there are two facets of voice, one of which is related to sound and to the body, the other to the notion of space and to the position of the speaking subject. A reflection on the conventions of oral storytelling reveals the distance between these two poles of voice, a distance which has been masked by the conventions of written narrative and has led to a certain confusion in the use of the term. The novel Divina Trace by Robert Antoni is used as an example of the way in which a writer’s desire to imitate orality allows us to understand the functioning of voices in fiction. Antoni’s novel creates a complex relation between the sound of voices and their positioning in the narrative structure. Antoni explores the process through which oral communication gives birth to stories in the Caribbean, thus offering an interesting perspective not only on the culture of the Caribbean, but also on the very nature of voice and its relation to storytelling.

How far can the lacanian concept of the vocal object help us read a novel by Thomas Hardy and bring to light its modernity? In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the motif of the stain (or spot) has a vocal quality: the vermilion words painted on the wall “shout themselves out”, something is shown in the field of the gaze in lieu of the voice. Thus Tess’s voice is hardly ever heard, her lament is never vocalized, it seems to be stuck in her throat. By making reference to Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of Munch’s painting, The Scream, I intend to show how the concepts of ‘voice qua object’ and ‘gaze qua object’ throw a light on the enigmatic question of voice in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and thus appear relevant to literary studies. In normal life, the consistency of our experience of reality depends on the exclusion of the objet petit a from it. What happens in Tess’s tragic world is that the ‘object small a’ has somehow got stuck in her reality, it has not been fully repressed and excluded. Tess occupies a borderline position in which the horror of the object is very nearly encountered. Tess will have to be hanged so that her voice may no longer be a threat, for the question involved is that of feminine jouissance, the dangerous enjoyment ‘beyond the phallus’ which has to be suppressed if phallic order is to prevail.

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.

Graham Swift’s oeuvre reflects a fascination with voice which appears most clearly in two of his novels, Waterland and Last Orders, but in seemingly diametrically opposed ways. Whilst Waterland foregrounds the act of narration through a voluble and chatty narrator, Last Orders is deprived of any central narrating agency and consists of a collage of different voices. In spite of this, in both novels, voice is a factor of instability as it no longer speaks with authority but proceeds erratically and repetitively, constantly echoing other voices. Voice unsettles the narrative by imposing multiplicity and fragmentation against the fantasy of a stable origin and a single meaning. But more importantly, our perception of the novel is transformed once we start ‘hearing voices’ instead of (or as well as) characters: by its ability to detach words from any clear origin, place or time, Swift turns those who speak into ghosts whose ‘presence’ is a mere illusion. Beyond similarities, the two novels also help us reflect on a diverging use of voice: in Waterland the narrator’s multiple voices reflect a sense of loss and alienation coupled with the impression that there is no getting away from oneself; by contrast, in Last Orders, the echoes which form themselves through the various voices have a liberating effect, allowing the characters to exist in a realm where they can be more than themselves.

This paper explores the potentialities opened by the Lacanian concept of voice as object in the study of literary texts: is not the literary voice, by definition, silent, since we hear it with our eyes? Through examples taken among modernist writers, we shall see different modalities of voice: how, in a chapter of Ulysses dedicated to the ear, “Sirens”, Joyce puts the Other’s discourse and its excess of significance to silence, through a particular binding of voice to letter. Katherine Mansfield’s stories centre on an epiphanic moment of suspension which always ends in a trickle of voice uttering the impossibility of finding a signifier for femininity. In Conrad, the ‘acousmatic’ voice is indissolubly associated with a spot of time, a blind spot in the picture which betrays the authority of established models or ideals. Voice, then, is more than ever what is at stake in modernity insofar as its presence foregrounds epistemological uncertainty and the lack of guarantee in human utterances. It is most often the vehicle for recording and transmitting affects like anxiety, joy, bliss, horror which can be the hallmark of a writer’s style.