During my first semester of graduate school, I was a research assistant for a rhetoric and composition professor who was starting to think about a project on voice. When she explained it to me, she said that she wanted to write against the idea that voice can’t really exist in writing, at least that’s the way that I remember her characterizing this supposed argument. I can’t now recall what she was responding to nor can I say anything of the research that I did for her that semester. None of it stuck because these issues didn’t yet animate my life. But today I find myself thinking again about voice and writing.
There’s been something about turning down the tenure-track job last week that has ignited my desire to get back to my own academic work. I suspect its partially fear and partially an awareness that I need to show continued productivity. So much of my post-doc has been about serving bryn mawr that I’ve hardly had time to let my thinking about my own interests grow and develop. I guess now that I can see its end, I’m starting to get excited about returning to my own projects. I have several in mind, though I’m also aware that I should really revise my dissertation and try to turn it into a publishable monograph.
But instead of getting back to that first project, I have a real sense about a book I want to write that’s quasi-academic and quasi-autobiographical, probably the kind of book that would never find a publisher nor an audience. But still, I want to write it. And here’s where we get to the question of voice.
Over the last year and in this bloggish space, I’ve found again a voice that was dampened during graduate school. It’s the voice that’s in my head and the one that feels completely natural. But it’s also a voice that seems to be able to speak with authority only about that which is autobiographical. Turn the conversation to Emerson or gender, realism or space, and I started to get nervous. My sentences get clipped or they bloat grotesquely, clause after clause after tangled clause. I get paralyzed by weak verbs and I take shelter in encyclopedic footnotes. I make tiny claims because I can only seem to see the trees and never the whole forest. I read books about academic writing and making better arguments, but nothing seems to help because in that voice --the one of my dissertation -- I’m fundamentally estranged from the voice in my head.
I’ve spent a long time thinking about this problem of my academic voice and its origins in a larger problem of knowledge and authority. J and I talk about like it’s chronic and progressive disease. He’s usually there to help me untangle the mess I’ve made. He sees more clearly and writes with more fluidity than almost anyone I know. When I first met him, he told me that when he started graduate school, he wanted to write a dissertation that sounded like Faulkner. I thought that that was the strangest and most beautiful thing anyone could ever desire. And then I started to read his writing and I realized that he had, indeed, found a way to write history, really fine history, like he was writing a novel.
So this new project that I have in mind is both exciting and terrifying to consider. I want to find a way, through the fear, to wrestle this voice — the one I use here — into one that can speak about Catharine Beecher or the history of the recovery of women’s literature. In other words, I want to stop ventriloquizing a codified academic speak and start forging a new way for myself. I don’t know if this is even possible or how to begin this process, but I think if I’m going to start doing the work that I want to do, I need to find a way forward in my own voice.
Is that a crazy desire?
6 comments:
I really love this post and can relate to it. In my case, I feel like my academic writing "voice" is far inferior to my academic speaking "voice," and I'm just befuddled about what to do about it. I suppose this is part of being a junior academic, but even as I make the move to no longer being junior, I still haven't made this transition that I feel like I should have. Thanks for putting this so well and for providing such insights into it. I love the idea of the new project, too. I say go for it.
after this I swear I will stop posting comments on every one of your entries. lord. but no that's not crazy. I got the courage to do that after the Thoreau piece was published, and it's been such a relief to realize that I can tell a story in these "academic" writings, and that other people will want to hear that story. Then too there is the excitement of following the story that is already there with your words, letting it set the pace and shape, and at the same time hemming it and connecting threads and pieces that are hovering around the edges. I think you already do it more than you give yourself credit for. But either way, I say go for it.
maura, i love and need your comments! they're one of few things that make me want to keep writing here.
Not even a little crazy. I decided to step outside of academia (sort of - I still work at an academic publisher), and a big reason was that everything felt so distanced from myself. Finding your voice, and creating a work that makes the academic personal, is a really noble cause. And you'll find your audience eventually. You've already found one here!
I was babbling about Faulkner because his work felt truer than most academic history writing about the South. It still does, though these days I'm not nearly as despondent about historians' ability to say something worthwhile about the past. This is what happens when you labor for years to write your own work of history. The task humbles you. Or, in my case, makes you stay in grad school until your hair begins to gray and you become even more curmudgeonly and the only thing that finally brings you back to the world is a chance encounter one fall day with someone you should have properly met years before and who writes—compellingly, beautifully, funnily—to you about Henry James, his brother Will, and the pleasures of shearing mice brains. - Signed, J.
I love your writing here. As I've written before, it makes me wish that we were all speaking more openly and of the things that really made us tick rather than only setting ourselves to the task of learning to speak like Perry Miller. :)
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