To Reveal Thy Heart Perchance to Reveal the World

Abstract

Ronald PELIAS, a professor of speech communications, employs a variety of writing methods as examples of alternative ways to do research and to share with the reader a seldom seen and seldom considered aspect of academic life: Heart. In the early chapters of the book, PELIAS sets out to establish a way to place his Heart in the foreground; baring his emotional vulnerability, his humanness, his being in the world. Later chapters of the book encompass an autoethnographic study of academic life in which the previously revealed Heart is placed in context. In this review essay I discuss PELIAS' book in relation to the larger literature on autoethnography and subjectivist research; I follow this by discussing the need for and usefulness of such alternative methods using PELIAS' autoethnography of academic life as a context. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs050279

Keywords

• autoethnography
• academic life
• communications
• personal narrative
• subjectivism