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In his article "In Their Own Words: On Writing in Second Person," Joshua Parker reflects on second-person narration and looks at the issue from the perspective of authors who use such narration in their works. In Parker's view, authors' self-commentaries may help us understand better the possible functions of second-person narration in fictional texts. Parker's main claim is that these authors are men and women "with professional experience as writers, who are capable of speaking quite eloquently on their own reasons for writing in second person" (167). One argument that seems to follow from this, although it is not expressly mentioned in the text, is that authors' viewpoints ought to be favored over narratological or other literary-theoretical approaches or ought at least to be taken more seriously than has hitherto been the case. As Parker puts it, there is "a surprising dissonance between what theorists often tend to assume about the form and what authors themselves experience in creating it" (167). He even proposes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a "writer response theory" in analogy to reader response theories (167). Parker presents authors' self-reflexive comments, quoting writers such as, among others, Chuck Palahniuk, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Pam Houston, Lolo Houbein, Peter Bibby, and John Encarnacao, who talked in interviews or wrote in non-fictional writing about their use of secondperson narration. The main result of Parker's survey of these com*Reference: merits and of a number of texts written in second person is the following: "Seeing the self as 'other' often only takes place during descriptions of certain events or over periods of text. This self, like its experiences, is unstable. What is inscribed in second person, then, is the author's relationship to this self, a relationship often in flux" (171). Before I address Parker's main claims in more detail, I will outline four aspects that, to my mind, need to inform any research on writing in second person not only because they already appear individually or in combination in most scholarly work addressing this type of narration (e.g., Fludernik, "The Category of 'Person'"; Kacandes; Richardson) but also because they allow for interdisciplinary approaches to the topic (see Mildorf): 1. the anthropological dimension; 2. generic distinctions; 3. structural typologies; 4. functions and effects. Parker mixes up these aspects...