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Abstract

Writing for the Plot? Thoughts on Academics as Writers

In one of her books, bell hooks concludes: “All academics write, but not all see themselves as writers.” This paradoxical dilemma is the starting point for this article, which aims to explore and challenge the notion of academic writing and knowledge production as rational, un-gendered and disembodied intellectual activity. Against the backdrop of neoliberal research policies, with their accelerating demands for marketable and measurable results, it is perhaps more import than ever to claim, in the words of Martha C. Nussbaums, “faculties of thought and imagination” as the crucial but unquantifiable core of humanistic education and research. This article argues that the very naming of the practices and skills required for scholarly work affects our understanding of them in terms of professional competence and scientific authority. Furthermore, these normative thought patterns on what academic writing is; who performs it and how it is done often also reveals a hierarchized dichotomy between scientific and literary writing. What would happen if scholars in literary studies would ask themselves not only how, for instance, poetry can be theorized, but also how theory can be ‘poeticized’? Would it possible for the scholar to adopt narrative techniques such as travesty, metaphors and plot? Is it, in short, possible to not only read but also write for the plot? Thus, in highlighting the borderlines and sites of intersection between genres as possible sites of dialogue, the article promotes a plea for a genre-transgressive, embodied and emotional view of the methodologies and epistemologies of academic writing.