Gail Summerskill Cummins, “Coming to Voice,” in Yancey
p. 48:
Gibson defines voice in writing: “author’s created persona, his mask or voice”
mask metaphor works because in classical Greece “the mask both identified a character and helped project that character’s voice.”
masks “identifies, disguises, protects.”
p. 49:
“mask worked both internally as an amplifier for the wearer and externally as an identifier for the audience.”
“writer’s voice projects internal attributes, qualities, and selves of the writer, while at the same time protecting the writer’s identities.”
voice should not be seen as “nominal,” but rather as a “process of seeing, reseeing, and redefining our selves [50] and the role-relationships we, our selves and others, play as we create written voices within the constraints of our language, our discourses, and our culture.”
p. 50:
“I am struggling to lift off masks as I write this text. The voices in the room deafen. I hear the voices in my editor’s comments and suggestions; I hear the voices of my ‘research’ – articles by Toby Fulwiler and Nancy Sommers, books by Gloria Anzaldúa and Melanie Sarra Hanson, poems by Sharon Olds. I feel like a giant channel, trying not to drown in the streams of ideas, trying not to succumb to others’ authority, trying to allow myself, somehow, to author.”
Sommers quote: “It is in the trill of the pull between someone else’s authority and our own, between submission and independence that we must discover how to define ourselves.”
Cummins: “The pull between submitting to an other’s voice or depending on our own is defining. To author, it is necessary to have authority and the courage to authr, as well as the will to challenge authority.”
p. 51:
Bakhtin: “Language for the individual consciousness lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s.”
MY THOUGTHS: I wonder if I can link “Arts in the Contact Zone by Pratt into voice in writing? What is Bakhtin getting at in this quote (without me reading his work)? I think there is this contact zone where students meet the authority of the university, and what comes out of it? It can be arts or perils, and right now, all too often, I think we see the peril of students making an awful parody of academic writing, not because they are bad writers, but because they must assume the language of the academy and the authority that goes with it, but don’t know how, because they leave behind their own authority. hmm…
Cummins doubts her own voice as well “because of the pull of someone else’s authority”
p. 52:
“All written voices are relational and in role; the task of the writer is to come to know these role-relationships through and in the act of writing.”
MY THOUGHTS: This idea that voices and relationships keeps arise (perhaps out of the metaphor of voice itself), and it’s something that I never considered before I began researching this topic. It’s interesting, and I think I’m beginning to see where it fits in. We have to discuss relationships, or as Cummins says, be conscious of them (p. 51) as we write, to change ourselves in these relationships from object to subject (p. 51).
p. 53:
Hanson’s (1986) five stages of voicing:
“1. My voice (an unconscious, experientially grounded voice);
2. My Voice and the Foreign Voice (telling or showing what is learned, usually in the third person, and written in passive-voice exposition);
3. The Learned Voice (a voice beginning to take in and use that which is heard);
4. The Inherited Voice (the familial, internal voice);
5. The Owned Voice (a voiced self as owner and authority).”
p. 58:
“Voices construct writers: we do not write alone but in the company of, and with, voices from different discourse communities.”
OVERALL: So, we need to be conscious of constructions, conscious of voices in our heads and around us, in order to find our voice, in order to be able to find our authority and be able to write. We must move from object to subject, go through a “self-transformation, if we believe with Paulo Freire that to know our constructions is to begin to construct differently” (60).
