Finding your voice
Posted on | March 13, 2006 |
John Byron has just saved me from writing a post about this, which is on Saturday. Yay! I’m going. I so want to know where my voice went. Well actually, to be serious, I’m keen to hear what other academics have to say about this, given that I’ve spent the last year writing about voices, and arguing for the importance of developing an ‘affective voice’ in humanities scholarship (my publisher has decided the book’s title has to be changed again, to ‘Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices’ - no subtitle, so I guess I got the point across). The problem I have had with my own work is that the mode of criticism I advocate in the book is one that to some extent ‘tries on’ the voice of the person described for the length of the chapter/encounter, as a way of offering a positive and affirming style of scholarship. While I fully stand by the benefits of it as a principle, I’m also suspicious that it’s been my easy and lazy resolution to my own problem, as a Libran, of being swayed by whatever I just read. It’s also been a highly instrumental and practical way to produce a thesis and a book within 6 years.
One thing I remember being impressed by when talking with Andrew Ross last year was the way he described the objective he had for his grad students - that they find their own voice, and rid themselves of the language they think they need to be able to express themselves in a scholarly way. Couldn’t agree more. In the paper I’ve got coming out in our Continuum special issue, I talk in some detail about how this dilemma has yet to be resolved in cultural studies, that is, the professional expectation to write in an academic fashion (and face endless criticism from newspaper columnists because of it), versus writing that fits the idea that ‘culture is ordinary’, and not something special that we need to be initiated into. On this, I loved Catharine Lumby’s line at the PreFix event last year: ‘You’ll be surprised how little counts as expertise in the media’. Anyway, given that the Hoggart conference is single stream, and I’ll potentially be giving a paper in front of three of the five writers whose voices I talk about, it’s certainly the right time to learn how to be myself.
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March 16th, 2006 @ 10:50 am
i wish more people would write about how their starsign affects their academic work (this probably sounds sarcastic but i am 100% SERIOUS i.e., i am a virgo).