The Academic "I" (Part 1)

Thesis supervisors sometimes ask their students, "But where are you in this text?" They are not normally asking them to write "Here I am!" every now and then in the text.

One of the most legitimate reasons to ask this of students is when we are faced with a text that is about to buckle under the weight of its citational politeness.

Whilff (2001) has noted that this is an age of the lone pig. But in his celebrated analysis of the situation, Xavier (2002a) has emphasized also the cow, the horse and the hedgehog. Yssling (2002), meanwhile, was able to identify several pigs, "thoroughly undermining that facile, if fashionable, lone pig idea" (Ziegler 2003, p. 17).

Such passages are both justified and necessary in academic writing, but no text should confine itself to this sort of expression. The reason for this is that the putative "author" of the text becomes little more than a reader of other texts and these are texts that the target reader is in most cases (presumably) already familiar with.

When the supervisor asks you to put some of yourself in the text, it will not do to say

I have chosen to take Walter Whilff's Stall and Field as my point of departure. He notes that this is an age of the lone pig (Whilff 2001, p. 58). But in his celebrated analysis of the situation, Xavier (2002a) has emphasized also the cow, the horse and the hedgehog. Yssling (2002), meanwhile, was able to identify several pigs, "thoroughly undermining that facile, if fashionable, lone pig idea" (Ziegler 2003, p. 17). Despite this, I find Whilff's arguments generally compelling.

The presence of the author in a text should not be tantamount to the presence of arbitrary judgements made on the work of others. Still, one minimal way of bringing some of "you" into the text is to pass judicious comment on the texts you read.

Whilff (2001) has astutely noted that this is an age of the lone pig. It is true that in his celebrated but very uneven analysis of the situation, Xavier (2002a) has emphasized also the cow, the horse and the hedgehog and it is also true that Yssling (2002) seems to have been able to find and even name several pigs. Still, Ziegler's conclusion, that Yssling thereby "thoroughly undermin[ed] that facile, if fashionable, lone pig idea" (2003, p. 17), is surely an exaggeration. Much depends on the relations that can be established between these various beasts.

Note that the authorial persona has entered the text without calling itself by name ("I"). The materials are introduced and evaluated, and instead of simply starting with Whilff's idea and ending with Ziegler's the reader is initiated into a rich texture of disagreement, an intertextual tension that can obviously be occupied by any number of other persons, including the reader. Indeed, the phrase "it is true" makes the amiable presumption that the reader of the present text is already familiar with the others (thus assigning the reader a place without resorting to "my dear reader", which should be used with extreme restraint.) Lastly, the raised eyebrows of "and even named" indicates a sensitivity for the relative weight of the facts that impinge on the situation as seen from the author's own point of view. The author has led by example.