Voice

Abstract

The concept of the writer’s voice is central to the way that contemporary literature is read, evaluated, circulated, and criticized, appearing everywhere from the creative writing classroom to online reader reviews. Yet, voice remains a slippery and tendentious concept: Is voice something a writer has, or is it something a writer is? Does everyone have a voice? Are some voices voicier, and how? What form does voice take on the page? How is voice different from style or constrained by genre? In this essay, we track voice’s many meanings across a large corpus of what we call “vernacular literary criticism.” First, we consider the ways that voice is used in different communities and the writers it is used to describe. Second, we develop a conceptual model of voice's many uses, based on our reading of a (limited) ver-sion of our composite corpus. Finally, we build a word-embedding model to track voice's use in a larger discourse. Ultimately, we show that voice, style, and genre operate in a unified vernacular critical sys-tem, that voice (along with genre) is a subcategory of style, and that voice consists of the parts of style not otherwise captured by genre.