The Diary

Diary writing is an intimate mode of expression in which individuals seek to find meaning in their personal lives and relations, responding to the external realities in which they live.  Their coping is subjected to their historical, educational and social contexts, and to the generic conventions of diary writing.  This course examines the diary as a genre, exploring its functions, meanings, forms and conventions, comparing it with fictive and non-fictive autobiographical writings such as the diary novel, autobiography and the memoir, as well as comparative gender diary-writing.  Selected texts
for the course are some canonical individual diary texts as the 17th century English diaries of Pepys and Ann Clifford, and the 20th century diary of Anais Nin.  The diary corpuses are the 19th century intimate journals of young French girls, Colonial and American Civil War women diaries, such as Sara Morgan's and Mary Chestnut's, and WWII European Holocaust diaries, such as Hayim Kaplan's, Victor Klemperer's and Etty Hillesum's.