Suffering and writing. Autotherapeutic Functions of Some Polish Writers’ Personal Diaries (original) (raw)
Related papers
Teksty Drugie, 2014
Author num erous publications, including the recent book M iędzy zapisem a literaturą. D ziennik polskiego pisarza w XX wieku.
Using diary writing: a narrative of radical courage
Text, 2017
This article considers the use of diary entries as primary source material in autoethnographic research. It examines how the act of diary writing can reveal a trajectory into, and away from, an experience of depression and how diary entries can provide grounds for conjecture about possible futures and imagined self-narratives. It describes how 'radical courage', as identified by Phillips, can displace suicidal ideation and bolster a new self-narrative of an imagined future. The article highlights the value of diaries. More than a source of raw data for research and creative writing projects, they offer diarists a safe place to explore and create alternative and productive selfnarratives. In their unedited state, they are a first-person, present-tense record of emotional states, showing how context and events impact upon an individual's life. Diary entries can reveal to the diarist and researcher alike the beginnings of a new selfnarrative that is not yet fully imagined nor articulated. The article includes selected diary entries and reflections on depression as a lived experience to show the connection between radical courage and a narrative of the future. This narrative forma narrative of the imagined futureis commended for its therapeutic potential as a cognitive strategy to build resilience. Through writing and speaking, the story develops as it is lived; by being lived, the story becomes embodied.
Letters and Diaries as Life Writing
JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 2020
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution: The burgeoning field of life-writing studies constitutes a meeting ground of historiography and literary criticism. Historians and literary critics approach one and the same phenomenon from different disciplinary perspectives and with different epistemological interests. For historians, the texts that literary critics call life writing are personal documents, Selbstzeugnisse, or ego-documents that help pave the way toward understanding the “subjective dimension” of history, i.e., the personality, minds, motivations, emotions, and worldviews of concrete historical actors, who made, experienced, or endured history.[1]
Diaries are ‘better than novels..- Revisiting the diary for creative writers .docx
Abstract This paper [1] revisits the diary form of first person narrative. The diary is often a major primary resource in the creation of autobiographies, biographies and scholarly research projects, documents and reports. It is also often a rich source of inspiration for fiction, used by many writers as a tool for recording working ideas and progress, and mobilised in teaching creative writing. We argue that, despite this importance in the writing field, the diary has slipped from view in terms of creative writing research and scholarship. By examining its form, historical evolution, uses and what diaries illuminate about writers and their worlds, we foreground unique aspects of the diary that can provide writing inspiration, assistance with production and avenues for further research Keywords: creative writing, diary, journal, autobiography, creative writing research. -- Diaries have their own contradictions and inadequacies as primary sources but they remain a valuable voice, a bridge between the past and the present and a precious resource (Simpson 2007
The Diary between Literature and History: A Historian's Critical Response
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.
Diaries: Who Keeps Them and Why
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1996
Sutnmary.-Direcred diary keeping is an important method of gathering data for various therapeutic and research purposes. Little information, however, has been collected on spontaneously kept diaries. A questionnaire relating to personal diary keeping and five personality inventories were administered to 101 undergraduates. Analysis suggested that women keep diaries more often and at an earlier age than men. Also, information regarding diary content and reasons for starting and stopping a diary are discussed. Surprisingly, scores on personahty inventories were not significantly ddFerent for respondenrs who had kept a diary than scores for those who had not.
TEXT
This paper [1] revisits the diary form of first person narrative. The diary is often a major primary resource in the creation of autobiographies, biographies and scholarly research projects, documents and reports. It is also often a rich source of inspiration for fiction, used by many writers as a tool for recording working ideas and progress, and mobilised in teaching creative writing. We argue that, despite this importance in the writing field, the diary has slipped from view in terms of creative writing research and scholarship. By examining its form, historical evolution, uses and what diaries illuminate about writers and their worlds, we foreground unique aspects of the diary that can provide writing inspiration, assistance with production and avenues for further