Letters and Diaries as Life Writing

Experiments in Life-Writing

Other people's life stories fascinate us, and we seem to have an urgent need to record these stories. As writers continue to experiment with the formal and aesthetic possibilities of rendering their subjects' lives in ever new ways, the modes of writing about historical lives have diversified enormously, and continue to do so. The proliferation of public interest in accounts of historical lives in recent decades-captured by such buzzwords as "biography boom" or "memoir craze"-is reflected in the similarly expanding field of life-writing studies, as scholars regularly re-conceptualise their object of study to keep pace with the rapid evolution of life-writing forms and to incorporate the new insights their discipline has yielded. Within this context, the term "life-writing" itself has emerged to reflect the diverse work conducted in the field. It has now come to stand for a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings, . . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms. 1

Russian Review, 2004

There emerge two types of responses to the question framing this forum on diaries, their significance and scholarly uses. One is contained in the individual essays themselves. Each of them proposes a distinct strategy of working with a particular diary, or a set of diaries, and arrives at conclusions based on this specific case. The plurality of approaches, emphases, and responses to be observed in these contributions stems in part from the fact that they discuss diaries from a variety of social milieus and historical contexts, ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; but it is also a matter of a given scholar's methodological and stylistic preferences. Such preferences are to a certain extent effects of the different forms of disciplinary training characterizing the professions of the historian and the literary specialist, respectively, but they are also a matter of personal sensibility and taste; conceivably these latter traits assume particular weight in an analysis of personal sources as rich in expression of subjective viewpoints as the diary. In light of such creative plurality, any attempt to formulate a "synthetic definition" of the diary may appear daunting.

I analyse the constructed nature of experience through the concepts of immediate experience (Erlebnis) and reflected experience (Erfahrung) and suggest that the latter is grasped and expressed by narration. I also propose that human beings understand themselves and others as well as their lived reality and temporality through narration and that, in this sense, narration has ontological significance for a human being. Human existence is seen as narrating, ‘being in a story and being as a story’. In this theoretical framework, letters can be seen as a form of narrating oneself and one’s experience. Writers not only narrate themselves but also the other, the recipient, and their relationship. I regard letters as ‘writings of the self’ in my analysis. They are often fruitful sources for studying subjective experiences, but this requires methodological rigour. There is always a difference between the self of the letter and the lived self. Letters afford a perspective on the person. I test my points in examples from the correspondence of two nineteenth century Finnish couples belonging to the gentry, the Snellmans and the Castréns. These letters illustrate how the writers construct and narrate themselves, the other and their romantic relationship in this dialogical space. Key words: historical research; experience; letters; narrative; narrative ontology; hermeneutics; understanding; biographical research

European Journal of Life Writing, 2018

2020

As those who write themselves, life narrators are readers, interpreters, and curators of the archival material, both intimate and impersonal, accrued during their lifetimes. These materials form an archival pre-life that is extended and complemented by posthumous remediations of their narrated lives. Personal archives may include writing in journals and diaries, digital exchanges on social media and blogs, documents, and images in photographs and drawings, as well as the ephemera of recorded memories and impressions; as this archive is activated in life writing, its texts project an archival imaginary. Once a life narrative enters public circulation, the archive of self accrues future ‘afterlives’ as it is edited, reframed, and remediated in subsequent editions and by translation into other languages or media for different reading publics, both during and after a writer’s life. The interactive relationship of self-archives and afterlives makes clear that the texts of self-life-writ...

Ilha do Desterro Vol. 74 No. 2 (2021): Life Writing, 2021

The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life is a comprehensive collection that takes on the task of charting diary studies historically and theoretically, discussing the function of diaries in different societies from a global perspective throughout time. The

Teksty Drugie, 2014

Author num erous publications, including the recent book M iędzy zapisem a literaturą. D ziennik polskiego pisarza w XX wieku.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2015

Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies.

This book gathers twenty-one essays by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson written in collaboration or solo and published over the last quarter-century.

European Journal of Life Writing

Drawing on a large body of scholarship from the last forty years, this article offers an overview of the diverse forms of life writing “from below” (by authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy) in Europe since the early modern period (including autobiographies, diaries, letters, as well as transcripts of oral testimonies); and the varied and developing national traditions of collecting and archiving which have developed since the mid-twentieth century. It locates such writing within a field of force between an exteriority pole constituted by the state (or by organisations of civil society, or informal community pressures) which compel or otherwise elicit life writings from below, and an interiority pole of the impulse of someone hitherto excluded to narrate their life in some public sphere; and examines diverse ways (state compulsion or solicitation; citizen engagement, challenge or resistance) in which these pressures give rise to the production of texts. It identifies ...