Dear World

Diary writing has changed, changed utterly, in contemporary times. This is the premise of Kylie Cardell’s study of the genre. Although they remain popular, journals of adventure, exploration, and conquest, staples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel literature, receive no mention in Dear World. Private diaries of private lives, intended solely for the author’s spiritual benefit in earlier times, such as seventeenth-century Puritans’ “journals of conscience” and Mormon diaries, historical or contemporary, are also off Cardell’s radar except as progenitors of daily self-scrutiny. Diaries as the secret specialty of prepubescent girls, scrawling their hopes and dreams in leatherette volumes with tinny locks, are passé as the normative mode of diary writing in the highly public twenty-first century, Cardell argues. Although these literary forms still exist even in competition with Facebook and Twitter, they are not her concern. In the era of the Internet with its blogs, porn and dating sites, and confessional talk shows, contemporary diarists, argues Cardell, are creating a “public private self,” writing, drawing, and speaking for themselves and strangers, a vast and often unidentifiable public. The diary, like all literature, is a construct, explains Cardell, “a text created by the self,” but one which may also create the self. That representation “reflects not just the individual, but also discourse, culture, society, and power”(7). The defining characteristics of all diaries are their serial (though not necessarily chronological) form, the sense of immediacy they convey, and their representation of a self “perceived [to be] more-realistic-because-less-figurative”(98). Beyond these conventions, there are wide variations. The serial (daily, weekly, fragmentary, and intermittent) accounts of “ordinary lives, private lives, fluid, fragmented, and flawed, highly subjective” (11) may be written down, taped, talked, broadcast, drawn, smuggled, coded, decoded, revised, and presented in reverse chronology (the normative blog format) or as fiction (Bridget Jones’s Diary)

Aesthetics · Art · Confessional · Ethos · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Representation (politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Irish and British Studies · Philippine History and Culture · History · Law