In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary: “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.” What is the relationship between a writer’s lived experience and the works they present, crafted and bound, to the public? For Virginia Woolf, the diary was a place to reckon with the “oil well” of stories bubbling up inside her; for Roland Barthes, a space apart to wrestle with private loss and grief; for Annie Ernaux, the diary harbored the “raw and dark” material behind her fictions; and for Anaïs Nin, the distinction between fiction-writing and diary-keeping was difficult even to discern. On what sort of terms, then, can we take the writer’s diary? What kinds of insight does it promise—regarding literary craft, literary politics, artistic scenes, and creative processes? And how shall we approach this literary object—as a genre unto itself, distinct from other forms of life-writing such as autobiography, memoir, and auto-fiction?
In this course, we will read selections from writers’ diaries, beginning in the early 20th century and closing with Sheila Heti’s recent experimental work Alphabetical Diaries. Moving through time and space—from Woolf and Franz Kafka to Barthes and Nin to Sontag and Ernaux, with forays into Augustine’s 5th century Confessions and Rousseau’s 18th century work of the same name—we will ask how writers utilize their diaries in both their fiction and their criticism. Avoiding the “reduction” to which Sontag is rightly averse, we will explore how the diary—taken on its own terms—at once encourages and works against linear narrativization, and how it, perhaps uniquely, articulates anxieties of remembrance just as much as it does the fear of being forgotten.
