Writing Selves in Disguise: On Reading and Writing Acknowledgements

Abstract

This article explores the flexibility and adaptability of the practice of writing acknowledgements in humanities scholarship. If this text is more than marginalia, its multiple paratextual services raise questions that largely go unaddressed. Such questions have to do with knowledge―what a writing self knows about itself, how it gets round to knowing itself for what it is, and why it feels obliged to share its discoveries in knowledge with communities that build and sustain epistemological values. A course titled “Research and Publication Ethics” for newly admitted research students in the English Department of the University of Hyderabad initiated this discussion. The responses to the following questions sometimes bordered on the meanings of the ethical as marginal to the larger concerns of publishing research. Where, to begin with, do researchers see themselves situated when they write? What motives position a voice as “authorial” at the centre while the affectational motive tosses it up to the margins? How do a writer’s prefatory remarks and remembrances, admissions of commission and omission, make for respectable reading relations? The students were fascinated by the marginalia they collected, which sometimes betrayed unsuspected meanings as acknowledgements. The difficulty of writing acknowledgements is perhaps the writing of difficulty, a realisation that led the class to see a writer as often speaking, or ventriloquising, different voices, now at the centre and now on the margins. The ethical investments made by the writing self alternate between the marginal and the paratextual when readers engage with texts designated as “acknowledgements”.

Keywords:

• acknowledgements
• writing selves
• marginal/paratextual
• reading relations
• dharma/ethics

Notes

1 The two papers that considerably helped the class understand the professional networks and editing processes were those by Joshua Finnell (2014) and Robert Brown (2009). Another, perhaps more engaging, study is a chapter called “Acknowledgements and Dedications” by Helen Smith (2019), which none of us had had the luck to access during the semester. I subsequently found that Smith’s playful but quite thought-provoking insights and comments on Genette’s concept of “paratext” would have greatly helped us rethink our first impressions and immediate responses to acknowledgements during our seminars.

2 This “difficulty” can take many forms. We find authors who are helpless to adequately acknowledge books or articles that appear too late to be fully integrated into their readings (an example of which can be found in Note 1 earlier in this article). Some courtesies that must be acknowledged cannot be, because they happen to be far beyond the required duties of professional assistants.

3 Hua Peng, who has surveyed acknowledgement patterns in Chinese dissertations, poses the same question, according to Laura Micciche. In Chinese culture, name-dropping could be construed as “a face-threatening act for the acknowledged who does not want to be mentioned as such on a public occasion” (Peng, in Micciche 2017, 17). Since privacy issues may be involved in an author’s open acknowledgement of support for subjects considered controversial or partisan, prior “no objection” clearance would be desirable lest someone be seen as guilty and supportive by association with a dubious cause.

4 The curious anomaly of readers and writers of scholarship not being paid for their labour as such while their products are commercially bought and sold internationally is “business” that does not speak its real name. Unfortunately, readers very often have to pay to access research, although usually it is an institution that pays on their behalf. It would be true to say that writers of scholarly research don’t generally gain remuneration for their work and nor do their first readers or reviewers.

5 This phrase appears in the opening verse paragraph of Ash Wednesday, Section V, line 4. We ought to thank Alastair Pennycook for busting the “originality myth” around which much plagiarism debate is still conducted in non-Asian and non-African printing and publishing cultures. In “Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism” (1996), he tries to clear the air relating to the perception of authorial rights, claims, and privileges in cultures still engaged in postcolonial debate and dialogue. Of particular relevance here is Pennycook’s discussion of colonised memory, under the heading “Cultures of Memory and Text”.

6 A notable exception is Dan Pinck’s survey of acknowledgement pages called “Let Me Count the Ways” (2000). Witty and penetrating observations on selected writers and their motivations for specialist studies lend charm to this unusual essay.

7 For a brief but pointed discussion of deficient ethical commitments, see Julia Kristeva’s “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and … Vulnerability” in Hatred and Forgiveness (2010). I would see part of this essay, especially pages 34–36, as acknowledging the vanity of charity, the ethical delusions from which socio-religious institutions do not seem to recover in dealing with their disabled and vulnerable wards.

8 For a detailed discussion of “It-narrative” and incisive commentary on its fortunes, see Price (2009).

9 If a book could speak to us literally, it would offer admissible evidence of plagiarism and vandalism—the less known, if less noticed, forms of offence that go unreported and unacknowledged in our midst. Where “intellectual property” is taken very seriously and academic work amply rewarded for material contributions, people at least are vigilant and call out malpractices and plain theft. One instance of this was reported in a 2011 journal review of a Sheffield conference of European landscape architecture specialists. The most troubling violation of intellectual property rights, according to Jacky Bowring, “is the developing practice of conference attendees photographing presenters’ powerpoints while they are presenting them. Not only is this annoying for everyone trying to watch and listen amidst the irritating sounds of shutters clicking and people popping up and down like meerkats—it is a violation of intellectual property” (2012, 228).