Presentation on “Voice”

On April 25th, 2019, Annika Butler-Wall, Xander Manshel, Nika Mavrody, Laura McGrath, Nichole Nomura, and Alex Sherman presented their project, Voice.

What is “voice” in literary criticism? What does it mean for an author to have a voice? Who has a voice, how do they find it, and once found, where does it exist? “Voice” is a central metaphorical concept in the post45 literary field. As Mark McGurl has shown, the idea of the writer’s voice has been promoted and perpetuated by the creative writing program. But “voice” (or lack thereof) also governs publishing acquisitions (McGrath), the AP English classroom (Nomura), and book review discourse (Internet). Despite the concept’s centrality, it has yet to receive any rigorous treatment; it remains undefined, imprecise—but we know it when we see it. This talk takes the imprecision of “voice” as it’s starting point, attempting to develop a rigorous and capacious definition of the concept based on its use throughout a number of reading communities in the 20th century, drawing on the internet’s largest collection of reader-response criticism: GoodReads.