
English Language and Literature ETDs
Publication Date
12-20-1968
Abstract
The problem with which the dissertation deals is this: does the Journal offer a possible alternative to the conventional novel form in the twentieth century literature. The problem entails a study of the process by which a form meant for purely private uses becomes, through successive steps, a public form of art. The procedure employed involves keeping distinct six different types of Journal. The first and second chapters deal with the problems of making discriminations between these six different types. Out of these distinctions some idea of a tradition in the writing of the Journal can be arrived at, and from this tradition three representative twentieth century writers are chosen who represent three distinct stages in the development of the Journal from a private to a public literary form. These three writers are then examined in detail in three successive chapters, and the findings on their particular experiments with the Journal form are developed in these chapters and in the final chapter. The problem is approached in Chapter I through an examination of various arguments concerning “the end of the novel” with particular reference to the existential issue of authenticity which various writers and critics have put forward in the last fifty years. Various alternatives are discussed, and among them the Journal. Prior to an examination of individual writers of the Journal, six different types of Journal are outlined and described: 1) Private Journal—confidential, not meant for publication; 2) Private Journal—for publication; 3) Public Journal—written for immediate publication; 4) Journals as the “subconscious form” of a “novel”. In Chapter II, the first three types are examined through the use of individual examples, preparatory to an examination of the uses to which three individual modern writers put the Journal form. In Chapter III type four—the Journal as an art form—is examined in the writings of Andre Gide, and in particular, The Notebooks of Andre Walter, Type five experiment in mixing impersonal narration with the Journal first person form, The Counterfitters, is given particular emphasis, particularly in its relation to Gide’s published Journals. Type five involves not only the journal as one of the techniques of a novel which is primarily impersonal narrative, it also involves the journal as the form of the novel/ In Chapter IV J.P. Sartre’s novel in the form of a diary, Nausea, is examined. This work is reviewed in view of Sartre’s critical pronouncements on the novel particularly his seminal essay on Nathalie Sarraute in which he discusses authenticite and the “anti-novel”. Type six—the journal as the “subconscious form” of a “novel” is dealt with in Chapter V. The particular work under examination is Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett. Here Beckett’s elimination of the external forms of the Journal—particularly dated entries—are examined in view or the author’s intentions and his philosophical solipsism. The aesthetic solutions which Gide, Sartre, and Beckett find in the Journal form, together with the new problems which these solutions propose, are examined in Chapter VI. Beckett’s solipsism is central to this examination, and in this connection Wittgenstein’s strictures against the “private language” for a diary are used as a point of departure for some long-range as a viable alternative to the novel. The advantages of new techniques are measured against the possible disadvantages of a narrowing of the material of the novel. The problem of the authenticity of the individual subject separated from his society, as it appears in the Journal and the novel-as-Journal, is examined, and the findings of the dissertation are employed to form some conclusions concerning the future possibilities of the Journal as a genre in contemporary literature.
Degree Name
English
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
English
First Committee Member (Chair)
Frederick Bolton Warner, Jr.
Second Committee Member
Paul Benjamin Davis
Third Committee Member
Illegible
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Bingham, William. "The Journal As Literary Form." (1968). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/397