ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on authorial positioning in research articles. Through a comparative analysis of poetic ideals pertaining to authorial positioning and the embodiment of researchers-in-the-texts, a discrepancy between an ideal of authorial presence and a textual effacement of authorial presence is unfolded. This discrepancy is visible in the use of passive voice and in the sparse use of first-person pronouns in the texts. The effacement of authorial presence through the passive voice and the omission of first-person pronouns reveals a poetics of authorial effacement. Consequently, the idealised plane of poetics collides with a trans-disciplinary poetics of authorial effacement. This tension can be understood in relation to the inscription of the cardinal virtue of neutrality in the authorial position. In spite of a general ideal of explicating the acting subject by using active constructions and first-person pronouns, the ideal of neutrality can easily lead to authorial absence, dispassionate detachment, and a poetics of authorial effacement. Interestingly, this also differentiates the poetics of clarity as a field of tension and shows how certain poetic lacunae may exist.
