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The essay with a thousand faces: Academic writing and heroic narrative

Gooch, Alexander

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Abstract

This paper describes structural similarities between the academic essay and the heroic narrative. It presents a simple model of the heroic narrative, based on an analysis originating in the work of Campbell (1968), and it then traces correspondences between the structure of the heroic narrative and the structure of the academic essay as it is generally understood and taught in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes, and in Academic Language and Learning (ALL) contexts more generally. The article suggests that a good essay could be one that meets a reader’s narrative expectations and that the ‘heroic journey’ could provide a fruitful metaphor to consider the nature and function of essays.

Citation

Gooch, A. (2021). The essay with a thousand faces: Academic writing and heroic narrative. Journal of academic language and learning, 15(1), 134-143

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Aug 26, 2021
Publication Date 2021
Deposit Date Oct 20, 2021
Publicly Available Date Oct 21, 2021
Journal Journal of Academic Language and Learning
Publisher Association for Academic Language and Learning
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 15
Issue 1
Pages 134-143
Publisher URL https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/755

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The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution in educational and other non-commercial settings. Authors submitting to this journal are assumed to agree to having their work archived by the National Library of Australia.




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