Everyday Authenticity: Contemporary Uses of the Diary

Abstract

This thesis examines how diary narrative authorises contemporary experiential claims. How does the diary genre connect to selected locations and contexts for self-fashioning or self-presentation now? The diary is a shifting and multiple autobiographical practice that emerges variously in text and electronic mediait is not fixed but travels and assumes new forms. This thesis considers contemporary uses of diary in the context of therapy and self-help, journalism, testimony, and confession, through new and traditional media, and across a series of contexts including Australia, North America, Britain, and the Middle East. This thesis argues that across these various media and contexts, diary forms emerge strongly within a paradigm that privileges the eyewitness, the confessional and the individual and the construction and representation of authentic experience. This has particular consequences for the diary as a contemporary genre. The Introduction considers some key theoretical concepts for diary criticism and establishes a critical perspective. Here I foreground issues of genre, gender, and confession as well as discourses of authenticity and the everyday as central themes in the thesis. This discussion introduces the main argument, which is concerned with the locations and contexts for contemporary uses of diary. It establishes that diary is an important genre for contemporary self-representation and that it is a distinctive and powerful rhetorical device in contemporary life narrative. Chapter One examines the phenomenon of the how-to diary manual, or journal guidebook, an emerging genre that has gathered momentum in the last decade. Examining how-to diary texts by authors such as Sarah Ban Breathnach, Julia Cameron, Stephanie Dowrick, Ira Progoff, Tristine Rainer, and Michelle Weldon, the significance of the diary as a genre for authentic self-representation is analysed in this chapter. What are essentially self-help uses of diary by these authors draw on ideas of self and subjectivity that are both historical and shifting. In this chapter I explore how, and what, versions of the self are mobilised by contemporary howto authors. By turning to one of the most popular fictional diaries of recent times, Bridget Joness Diary, I analyse a highly popular and particularly provocative playing out of the diary as a tool of self-knowledge and authenticity. Chapter Two examines a particularly fertile context for the production of life narrative: war. The war correspondents Thomas Goltz and Paul McGeough use diary to explore the ethics of reporting conflict and to account for the presence of western journalists in foreign war zones. Assumptions of the diary as an authentic genre can be strategic; in the context of war reportage, the diary is a rhetorical device that can tap into desires for immediate, authentic and personal representation. Chapter Three develops a different approach to diaries of war. The diaries of Nuha al-Radi, Riverbend and Suad Amiry foreground issues of gender and problems of place. This chapter considers how al-Radi, Riverbend and Amiry use diary to shape quotidian, domestic and personal representations of experience during war and conflict that intervene in stereotypical representations of Arab women in the Middle East Chapter Four turns to a new form for diary: the blog or online diary. New technologies enable new forms and new ways of knowing and representing the self, and the digital subject is of intense interest for diary scholars. The online diary is one venue in which ideas of authorship, authenticity and subjectivity are played out and contested in contemporary culture. The example of the personal sexblog that is the focus of the last part of this chapter draws attention to intimate and confessional disclosure as a feature, and expectation, of writing online. Sex bloggers like Belle de Jour or Abby Lee emphasise connections, both in form and content, to the traditional diary and they produce narratives that are highly popular and highly marketable. As a coda to this chapter I consider the emergence of the blog book, a production in which the sex diary has been a prominent feature, and a phenomenon that puts considerable pressure on expectations and assumptions that attend contemporary uses of the diary. The Conclusion takes us back to the foundational question for this thesis: what is the effect of diary as a genre for contemporary self representation