Response to Amanda Fulford's 'Ventriloquising the Voice: Writing in the University'

Abstract

Writing frames are widely employed in academic writing courses in the U.K. Amanda Fulford raises the question of whether a student's voice is silenced, rather than facilitated, by them. She explores a path of writing as recovery of voice, by discussing Stanley Cavell's writing as a representative of a continual process of re-finding the self. The notion that expressing one's own voice is enabled by conversation with the other is, however, paradoxical: If one is apart from the community, how could the conversation be carried on? Is the uniqueness of one's voice unheard by or irrelevant to one's society? Fulford's stress on continuity, this paper argues, is associated with Cavell's ordinary language philosophy in terms of its awareness of how language changes. What I say represents but recreates what we as a community say. Writing as a re-finding of the self and as an expression of one's voice, is thus characterised as reading as conformity and rereading it as deconformity.