Hello Glenn, I hope I understand your comments correctly, but to me you raise two important issues: intertextuality and authorship in academic writing.

Academic stories are heavily based on intertextuality that is often fully accessible only to the members of a particular academic discipline. Take, for instance, a relatively innocuous word ‘infrastructure’. Most people have some general idea what is infrastructure, but when you use that word in my field (information systems) it brings in a body of hundreds of journal and conference papers to bear upon your work — whether this was your intention or not.

As to the issue of storyteller/narrator. To me, every narrative has a narrator. Words don’t appear from nowhere; there is always one or more human beings who wrote the article. Different scholars and disciplines have different views whether to use ‘I’ or ‘we’ in the case of a single authored paper, or even passive voice. Whatever the convention and linguistic trickery that may be applied to give an impression of objectivity, every narrative has a narrator.