Analysing authorial identity construction in the review article genre in Applied Linguistics

Authorial identity construction is one of many professional rhetorical strategies employed by authors in academic review genres. Authors usually create a persona to represent themselves, their seniority in the field, and the community to which they belong. The author’s visibility is made possible through several rhetorical devices. Perhaps the most remarkable way of such authorial identity construction in the review article genre is self-mentions. The aims of this research are (1) to find out what types of self-mention are frequently used in review articles, (2) to determine the frequency of use and distribution of self-mentions in the review articles, and (3) to investigate the rhetorical function of self-mentions in the different analytical sections of the review articles. The data, drawn from a randomly selected corpus of thirty-two review articles, were analysed using WordSmith Tools Version 6. The findings indicated that first-person plural pronouns were more frequently used than singular pronouns in the whole corpus except in the two review texts. It was also observed that the frequency of occurrence for the exclusive and inclusive pronouns was very close to each other. Most importantly, the inclusive pronouns were used not only as a politeness strategy to appreciate the readers and keep the writers’ claims balanced but also as a persuasive tool to seek the readers’ agreement in the evaluation of research developments. This study revealed that authors construct various professional personas as a rhetorical strategy to carve their authorial identity and credibility in the review article genre. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications in the field of academic writing in applied linguistics as well as other disciplines.

Levels of transculturalism and bilingualism in the Hungarian literature of Slovakia

The phenomenon of transculturalism is capable of activating and generating meaning within various spaces, levels and layers of literature. The study discusses different levels of transculturalism through certain authors and texts in Slovakian Hungarian literature, along with transcultural authorial identity, the transcultural meaning-making machinery of texts, transcultural practices of the social context, and transcultural directions and gaps in reception. The purpose of the paper is to classify some of the transcultural phenomena we encounter and to unravel the relevant conceptual and interpretative levels.

A DIACHRONIC STUDY OF THE AUTHORIAL IDENTITY IN TOURISM RESEARCH ARTICLES

The use of first-person pronouns (I, we) in writing research articles was remaining problematic for both inexperienced and advanced authors. Nevertheless, some research suggested that the FPPs were increasingly used in writing research articles (RAs) to indicate the authorial identity. This research aimed to investigate types, functions, and correlation of the FPPs in tourism RAs by employing the diachronic corpus linguistics method. The data of this research were accessed and downloaded through five open access journals published by Elsevier. There were 80 selected tourism RAs from the year 2015 to 2020 that classified into five corpora. AntConc was software that was employed to retrieve the FPPs from the corpora. This research discovered the FPPs I and we were constructed as six types of authorial identity that range from the least to the strongest authoritative identity in the past five years. The constructed authorial identity had three main functions for the authors of tourism RAs, tourism as an academic discipline, and the readers of tourism RAs. The statistical calculation showed that the correlation was 0.87 that signified the use of the FPPs was increasing in the following year. Keywords: authorial identity, diachronic corpus linguistics, the first-person pronouns, tourism research articles.

Writer Identity Construction in EFL Doctoral Thesis Writing

Research on EFL doctoral thesis writing is booming. The literature indicates a link between doctoral thesis writing and identity formation. Despite the call for scholarly attention on doctoral thesis writers, writers of doctoral theses in English as a Foreign language (EFL) settings have not been well represented in the previous studies. Moreover, although writer identity has been proposed as consisting of four aspects, most of the research has mainly adopted a corpus approach to discuss the discoursal self or authorial identity. To bridge these gaps, this study explored how multicultural writers at a university in Thailand constructed identity through EFL doctoral thesis writing and how their multiple aspects of writer identity interplayed. With the data triangulated from a questionnaire, written narratives, and semi-structured interviews, the study revealed that 1) multiple identities are developed through writers’ self-adjustment and social acculturation; 2) passive alignment to institutional conventions leads to an actual distancing from discoursal construction of writer identity; 3) self-marginalization as EFL learners, negative external voices, and the role of student writer most hinder the development and representation of the authorial self. The research recommends EFL learners should be explicitly informed of the notions of constructing an authorial voice in the writing of doctoral theses. Keywords writer identity; identity construction; EFL doctoral thesis writing; novice writer; non-native English-speaking context

“That city, that self”:

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.

Aj-ts’íib or el letrado? Authorial Identity in Gómez Navarrete’s Bilingual Maya Poetry

Latin America is witnessing a revival in the literary production of indigenous languages, yet contemporary indigenous writers must often negotiate between different cultural understandings of what literature should be. The purpose of this article is to take one bilingual poem, composed in Yucatec Maya and Spanish, as a case study of the writerly conflict between the Maya paradigm of ts’íib and the ‘Western’ ideal of the letrado. The poem, written by Javier Abelardo Gómez Navarrete (1942-2018), is entitled ‘K’u’uk’um kaan’ in its Yucatec version and ‘Serpiente de regio plumaje’ in its version in Spanish. Through linguistic and hermeneutic analysis of key extracts, the article argues that Gómez Navarrete’s poem can be read as an exploration of what it means to be a Maya writer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in terms of the antagonistic yet mutually constitutive relationship between the categories of ts’íib and the letrado.

The Issue of Authorial Manifestations in J. Barnes’s Novel “Flaubert’s Parrot”

В статье анализируется проблема автора в романе Дж. Барнса «Попугай Флобера». Проводится сравнение авторского начала в романе и в сборнике эссе Дж. Барнса “Something to Declare”. Доказывается связь между данными текстами. Анализируется фактический материал, представленный в сборнике эссе и в романе. Делается вывод о разнице представления материала в обоих текстах: в романе, в отличие от сборника эссе, есть альтернативные версии и вымышленные события. Кроме того, в романе автор вводит дополнительную повествовательную инстанцию — фигуру рассказчика по имени Джеффри Брэйтуэйт, используя ее как авторскую маску. От его имени рассказывается история путешествия героя по местам, связанным с жизнью и творчеством Флобера. Это составляет основную часть повествования, что подтверждается и заглавием романа. Рассказ о жизни самого Брэйтуэйта лаконичен и фрагментарен. В статье подробно анализируется образ рассказчика, выделяются два уровня или две повествовательные инстанции. Первый уровень, во многом транслирующий взгляды Дж. Барнса, может быть охарактеризован как литературоведческий, второй уровень связан с психологическими проблемами несчастливого в браке рассказчика, отсылающего читателя к образу Шарля Бовари, героя романа Флобера. В статье делается вывод о многоуровневом авторском начале в романе «Попугай Флобера». В сочетании с иронией и интертекстуальностью игра с авторским началом позволяет рассматривать роман Дж. Барнса «Попугай Флобера» как постмодернистский текст. The article analyzes the issue of authorial manifestations in J. Barnes’s novel “Flaubert’s Parrot”. It compares the manifestation of the authorial identity in the novel and in J. Barnes’s essay collection “Something to Declare”. The article proves that there is a definite congeniality between the two texts. However, the author of the article concludes that the manners of presenting information in the novel and essays are different, for the novel contains alternative versions of events and describes imaginary situations. Moreover, the author of the novel introduces a narrator, a certain Geoffrey Braithwaite who serves as his mouthpiece. It is the narrator who tells the story of the character’s travel across the places associated with Flaubert’s life and work. The travels constitute a major part of the narrative accounting for the title of the novel. The story of Braithwaite’s life is laconic and fragmentary. The article analyzes the image of the narrator and singles out two narrative levels, or aspects. The first level is largely associated with J. Barnes’s ideas and can be characterized as literary. The second level is related to Geoffrey Braithwaite, who experiences marital problems and reminds the readers of a Charles Bovary, a character of Flaubert’s novel. The article maintains that in the novel, the authorial identity is manifested at numerous levels. The author of the article underlines that due to the interplay of irony, intertextuality and authorial identity, J. Barnes’s novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” can be classified as postmodernist one.

Making Connections with Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis

Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis is often described as a profoundly lonely work, marking the loss of his oldest and most intimate friend, Charles Diodati. It also one of the first works to announce Milton’s epic ambitions, and accordingly it holds an important place in narratives that describe Milton as a singular, or even antisocial, poet, producing poetry from the deep well of his interior self. But this chapter examines the poem as a deeply social, collaborative work, and one of Milton’s important early experiments in using print publication to cultivate and maintain relationships. Milton needed printers to establish his name; printers like Augustine Mathewes and Matthew Simmons needed authors with established names as allies in their own extended war against print licensing and monopolies. The wider context of the Epitaphium Damonis’s production makes it clear that the circumstances of Milton’s stationers cannot be disentangled from the arc of his own career. His emerging authorial identity was not solitary but social, and print was an essential strategy for constructing, promoting, and preserving it.

What Made Milton?

This introductory chapter opens with a material reading of the John Milton that emerges from a publication produced early in his career, Humphrey Moseley’s 1645 Poems, arguing that Milton projected his authorial identity into the world alongside an ambitious stationer who likewise sought to fashion himself through the book trade. The authors consider the volume, its contents, author portrait and inscription, and relationship to Moseley’s contemporaneous publications as a case study that attests to ways in which Milton worked both with and against stationers in order to promote both his authorial status and his personal politics. The essays of Making Milton are then summarized as the editors set out the collection’s three main threads of argument: for the importance of the book trade and the ways in which Milton’s books were made available, read, and sold; Milton’s exceptionalism as an author who participated in the construction of his own profile as a writer; and the ways in which readers and other writers have contributed to shape Milton’s afterlives.