Sarig, G.
Description:
The impact of author’s textual presence is easily felt when it is there. As a concept, however, it is somewhat resistant to description and analysis. The purpose of this case study is to propose an instrument for the analysis of the elusive textual traces of authentic author’s voice and to explore how it can be implemented, reflectively, in educational contexts. Two critical assumptions underlie these goals. First, authors’ authentic voices are poetic artifacts, rather than direct expressions of the mental realities of ‘real’ individual writers. Second, readers can construct author’s presence and respond to it as authentic once they feel the author’s consciousness touches their own. Within this theoretical framework, I analyzed two short texts for textual traces of their authors’ authentic voices. Having located a literary text resonating with its author’s presence, I analyzed it with this goal in mind. The analysis yielded a set of six qualities of author’s presence: sincerity; self-revelation; creativity & innovativeness; intensity; interactivity and use of poetic devices. Next, I located a non-literary text, also exhibiting pronounced author’s presence, to look for similar qualities. This analysis showed that this text exhibited textual qualities equivalent to those identified in the first. The two analyses suggest that the readerly sense of author’s presence can be traced back to its textual origins, and that a pronounced author’s presence in a non-literary text does not seem to damage its scholarly texture. These conclusions are discussed in light of the hermeneutic nature of the study. Next, I discuss the controlled and thoughtful nature of the act of self-positioning in professional writing, and recommend using the set of qualities of author’s voice reflectively, rather than mechanically. Following this, I used a simulated written version of a think-aloud protocol to demonstrate how the set of six qualities of author’s presence can be used in the process of revising author’s self-positioning. An analysis of the planning and assessing moves in the protocol showed that in the majority of the moves I was engaged in while revising the text, one or the other of the six qualities of author’s presence was on my mind, either explicitly or inexplicitly. Of these, regulating the quality of self-revelation was the most frequent move. The analysis showed that I did not turn to the set of qualities proposed in this study mechanically, as one would to a check list. Rather, they were invoked in my mind spontaneously, as I was assessing my written product and planning how to improve it. Following an analysis of the protocol, I finally propose a series of practical reading and writing activities meant to help students become more literate and reflective in constructing author’s authentic voice in the texts they read and write.