Voices in Dialogue: Taking Polyphony in Academic Writing Seriously

Abstract

In the past decades, the notion of voice in the theorizing and teaching of academic writing has been the subject of much debate and conceptual change, especially concerning its relation to writer identity. Many newer accounts of voice and identity in academic writing draw on the dialogical concept of voice by Bakhtin. However, some theoretical and methodological inconsistencies have surfaced in the adaptions of the concept. Working from a refinement of the dialogical notion of voice based on the concepts of polyphony and interiorization, this article presents a methodological approach for analyzing voice(s) in writing. The article presents material around the evolution of an early-career researcher’s dissertation synopsis. The material is multilayered, including the writer’s text, transcripts from an interdisciplinary peer-feedback conversation with two colleagues, and a video-stimulated interview with the writer. Excerpts of the material were analyzed to trace the polyphony of interiorized voices that influenced the writing. This focus revealed the multivoicedness of academic texts as an effect of their history of coming into being. This article contributes to the question of voice and identity in academic writing from a dialogical psycholinguistic perspective by presenting a de-reifying notion of voice grounded in an understanding of writing as a polyphonic activity, which also feeds into the formation of a writer’s self.