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| ABSTRACTS
Yaëlle Azagury (Barnard College) Shifting spaces: the paradox of private and public in the diary
Using the diaries and journals of Gide and Valery, and perhaps a few others,
I want to explore the boundary between the private writing self and the
public writing self. Specifically, I want to examine an apparent contradiction:
the authors I have chosen write about political issues in their diaries,
but political issues are absent from their art. Thus I will address the
subject of the panel in a very different way than the other two panelists.
My approach will raise several questions. Does the absence of explicit
public discourse in the art signify denial or self-suppression; or is
it a refined sublimation, a liberation of sorts? Is the treatment of politics
in the diaries a prelude, or prefatory exercise, or ritual cleansing,
as it were, of noisy communal issues; or is it the sacred, secret, cathartic
expression of attitudes too dangerous for public regard? Is art a process
of selecting and purgation, or an occasion for evasion and deceit? Where
does the author’s literary identity lie, in the diary’s private
meditations that take up public issues, or in that public orchestration
of private obsessions which is art? Finally, what is more "private,"
a work of art which, to a great extent, springs from memory and the subconscious—the
most private recesses of the self—but which is meant for public
consumption; or a work of intimacy such as a diary, whose ruminations
on ideology and politics are rational and deliberative yet intended only
for the diary-writer’s eyes? It could be that "private"
and "public" have come to be the least stable of terms, and
that the realities that they are meant to describe are constantly shifting.
That may be why the memoir, that hybrid genre combining the diary and
the work of art, is the ruling form of literary expression in our day.
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