Positionality of Self in Writing and God Trick Fallacy
Aimée Morrison | University of Waterloo
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 4
Excerpt | I don’t write unless I get invited to. It’s not that I’m so important or famous or in demand. It’s that I tend to have a comically bad time getting through blind peer review, to the extent that it takes me years sometimes to get an article accepted. In at least one instance, I had a conference paper proposal rejected by a reviewer acting on behalf of the same program committee that, simultaneously and on the basis of the same research, had invited me to deliver the keynote address. An editor at a flagship new media journal very strongly pushed me, in the first piece I had written as a new professor, to take out all the things that had made the article fun for me to write, things that made it more readable, vivid, and effective. It was a paper about rhetoric and metaphor that was forbidden from employing rhetoric and metaphor to make its argument. The fate of the following sentence was the subject of a surprisingly long email chain: “Language may shift our view of the world, but a popular consensus on vocabulary and metaphor does not necessarily alter the material operation of that world: tucking a flower into a gun barrel creates a powerful visual symbol, but does not preclude the florist being shot” (Morrison 74). These editors, and others since, operationalize the idea that scholarly writing has a specific voice in which its arguments must be expressed, which seems to be much flatter, less spiky or silly, literal rather than figurative, impersonal, distinguished from my own style of writing by its formality and earnestness.
Key words | Academic Writing, Personal Pronoun, Positionality, Self, Chaos Theory, Life Writing, Donna Haraway
Aimée Morrison (ahm@uwaterloo.ca) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on autobiographical expression in social media, academic writing, and disability discourse. She is particularly interested in the links between standpoint epistemology and the development of “voice” in academic writing as it relates to equity and social justice in the modern university. Also memes. Her work has been published in Biography, New Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Composition Studies, and elsewhere.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Morrison, Aimée. “Positionality of Self in Writing and God Trick Fallacy.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 11 Oct. 2023, pp. 1.32–1.44, http://ellids.com/archives/2023/10/5.4-Forum-Morrison.pdf