Em-bodying the Author:

Authorial Representation in Electronic Journals

"I have been driven [to participate in various electronic environments] partly by curiosity and partly by the desire to build a community of people who share my interests and values. At another level, I have been driven by a fascination with the phenomenon of personal identity which goes beyond one's own physical presence to include all of the ways in which one becomes known to others."

Obviously, the author is physically absent in both print and electronic articles, represented only by the author bio typical of both formats. But electronic forms of authorial self-representation allow for the inclusion of many aspects of an author's identity, transcending the scope of the print lens that reveals only name, rank and affiliation. Electronic bios may seem conventional on the surface: like print articles, electronic essays often include mention of the author's name, rank and affiliation. These bios do depart from print conventions, however, by featuring a link from the author's name that leads to the author's home page or to another Web site of the author's design. These sites offer Web users a glimpse at aspects of the author's identity that are not conveyed in the print bio formula. To use Agre's words, the sites maximize the various "ways in which one [in this case, the author] becomes known to others."

Most of the Web articles that I have examined include this link between an author's scholarly presentation and one's more personal self-representation. Certainly the nature of this association varies among authors, but the linking of some type of personal representation with professional work is a shared phenomenon.

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If the inclusion of an author's photo on a book jacket or an author's place of residence in his or her bio marks a fissure in conventional models of authorial self-representation, then this trend among Web writers of linking personal pages to their professional work merits further attention for its new and significant departure from the disembodiment model. The presence and accessibility of personal details about authors, ones which the authors themselves create and furnish for us, serve to embody the author, in contrast to the authorial disembodiment that is characteristic of print journals.

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Embodiment occurs on both figurative and literal levels. Figuratively speaking, the author engages us not only in her professional work but in her personal life as well, thereby bringing the authorial presence closer to the reader/user. The fluidity that emerges between personal and professional helps construct an authorial identity or body. Literally speaking, too, electronic journals can embody authors when they include photographs on authors' personal pages. The majority of these photographs feature the author in an informal pose (see, for instance, the home pages of Jim English and John Unsworth), unlike many print books that, in the rare instance of including an author's photo, publish the author in a stiff pose. Electronic journal representations can thus furnish us with a glimpse of the author's physical body, which contributes to our sense of authorial embodiment more generally.

It is important to consider the trend I have observed among electronic journals in light of the movement among scholars to engage personal narrative in academic discourse. Unlike the writings of Jane Tompkins, bell hooks, and other members of this school, the electronic articles under discussion do not uniformly reflect a tendency toward including personal elements within the article itself. The scholarly product is not necessarily built around autobiography. Rather, autobiography is made accessible through the presence of a link or series of links to other ways in which the author has chosen to represent himself or herself on the Web. Indeed, those glimpses of authorial identity that we have via these other sites may or may not have anything to do with the article itself, unlike personal narrative strategies that argue for direct relationships between the personal and the professional. In representing themselves on the Web, authors may indeed weave personal experience into the digital text of their article, or they may retire the former to a separate but linked page. Or, they may create several pages, some of which share personal details and others of which remain professionally-oriented. The point is, authors set their own boundaries in relating the personal and the professional. Thus, although Web essays do not uniformly adopt personal narrative strategies, they nonetheless share with personal narrative the same function of acknowledging and promoting fluidity between personal and professional discourse.

Two ironies occur to me as I ponder the new forms of authorial self-representation in electronic journals. First, cyberspace skeptics fear that users' abilities to interact with each other on a basic human level will diminish as we emphasize computer-mediated communication. Electronic journals should cause them little anxiety, however, for this new forum offers users the opportunity to view the author in nonprofessional capacities such as home pages. Ironically, these glimpses of authors both as professionals and as people are far more valuable, in terms of the preservation of human interest, than authorial representations in print journals, which construct a dehumanized authorial skeleton comprised only of name, rank, and affiliation.

Furthermore, this "embodying" thesis stands in contrast to popular depictions of cyberspace as a zone of disembodiment. We hear countless examples of the absence of the body in cyberspace: people in online chatrooms experiment with passing as the opposite gender; listserv participants use androgynous pseudonyms; MOO users claim that rape is impossible since there are no bodies in cyberspace. With respect to authorial self-representations in electronic journals, however, the author's body is ironically much more present to us: the author creates links to personal information that constructs an authorial body in a way that print articles, with their reliance on a formulaic representation of the authorial body, do not. So among the abudant observations about the disembodiment that occurs in cyberspace, we should remember that one of its components, electronic journals, actually performs an embodying function.



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