Call for papers for a proposed panel for the Modernist Studies Association's
New Modernisms II
Philadelphia, PA, October 12-15, 2000
"The Monstrous Personal Chronicle": Personal Writings Between the Two
World Wars
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not
thinking . . . Some day this will have to be developed, carefully printed,
fixed. (Isherwood, Berlin Diaries)
Reading Gide's diaries . . . An interesting knotted book. It's queer that
diaries now pullulate. No one can settle to a work of art. (Woolf,
Diaries Vol. 1)
The 1920s and 1930s marked the flourishing - or "pullulating" - of a
literary genre that Robert Scholes has termed "The Monstrous Personal
Chronicle." The individual volumes of these works may currently fall
under the generic categories of diary (Nin, Woolf), memoir (Vera
Brittain), auto/biography (Stein), autobiographical novel (Richardson,
H.D.), or indeed, just novel (Miller, Ford, Rhys), and even poetry
(Pound), but in each case, in various ways, the texts resist such
categorizations. They tend to share some of the following
characteristics:
Sheer size, and an unfinished quality to individual volumes.
A narrative organized by time rather than plot.
A focus on the details - often the minutiae - of the writer's life.
Often, as in the case of Nin, Siegfried Sassoon, Isherwood, Brittain,
Storm Jameson, writers narrated the same material in different modes -
one purportedly fiction, one purported non-fiction - that clearly
overlap.
We seek papers that address the dilemma of genre in relation to these
personal writings, that pose the question of how NOT calling a text -
or a series of texts - novel, memoir, etc., enables a new, clearer
reading of the work. All theoretical approaches are welcome, though
clearly, this panel has some investment in the resurrecting, and
revisioning, of biographical criticism.
Send one-page abstracts by March 21 to Jonathan_Goldman@Brown.edu
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