The Mirror Diary

The Mirror Diary
Author: Garrett Hongo
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-08-17
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0472123297

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. The Mirror Diary tracks the emergence of an original poetic voice and a learned consciousness amid multiple and sometimes competing influences of complex literary traditions and regional and ethnic histories. Beginning with a literary inquiry into the history of Japanese Americans in Hawai`i and California, Garrett Hongo draws on his own history to consider the mosaic of American identities—personal, cultural, and poetic—in the context of a postmodern diaspora. Hongo’s essays attest to the breadth of what he considers his cultural inheritance and literary antecedents, ranging from the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Charles Olson. He explains free-verse prosody by way of John Coltrane’s jazz; praises his contemporaries, poets David Mura, Edward Hirsch, and Mark Jarman; and acknowledges his mentors, Bert Meyers and Charles Wright. In other pieces he engages with controversies and contestations in contemporary Asian American literature, confronts the politics of race and the legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, offers paeans to the Hawaiian landscape, and addresses immigrants newly arrived in America with a warm welcome. The Mirror Diary is the work of a poet fully engaged with contemporary politics and poetics and committed to the study and celebration of diverse traditions.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Author: Barry Denenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2002
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780439194464

In 1932, a twelve-year-old girl who lost her sight in an accident keeps a diary, recorded by her twin sister, in which she describes life at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.

The Mirror and the Veil

The Mirror and the Veil
Author: Viviane Serfaty
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2004
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9789042018037

The phenomenon online personal diaries and blogs is described. Insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and social sciences are given. The author describes the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and the features on the Internet.

Diary of a Drag Queen

Diary of a Drag Queen
Author: Crystal Rasmussen
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1473560497

Longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2020 Life's a drag... Why not be a queen? 'Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about.' Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her). Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience. (c) 2019, Crystal Rasmussen (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

The Diary

The Diary
Author: Batsheva Ben-Amos
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0253046955

The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.

Ongoingness

Ongoingness
Author: Sarah Manguso
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2015-03-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1555973361

“[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.” —The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

The Mirror and the Veil

The Mirror and the Veil
Author: Viviane Serfaty
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004489762

The Mirror and the Veil offers a unique perspective on the phenomenon of online personal diaries and blogs. Blending insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and from social sciences, Viviane Serfaty identifies the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and studies the original features it has developed on the Internet. She perceptively analyzes the motivations of bloggers and the repercussions their writings may have on themselves and on American society at large. This book will be of interest to specialists in American Studies, to students in literature, communication, psychology and sociology, as well as to anyone endeavoring to understand the new set of practises created by Internet users in America.

The Victorian Diary

The Victorian Diary
Author: Anne-Marie Millim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317012615

In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their creativity and establish themselves as authors. Their object was to manage, rather than to indulge or repress, their emotions for the purposes of perfecting their observational and critical skills. Reading these diaries as literary works in their own right, Millim analyses their crucial role in the construction of authorship. By relating these Victorian writers' diaries to their publications and to contemporary works of cultural criticism, Millim shows the multifarious ways in which diaristic practices, emotional management and professional output corresponded to experiences of the literary marketplace and to nineteenth-century codes of propriety.

A World of My Own

A World of My Own
Author: Graham Greene
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1504054318

The British author shares the “strange . . . inner layers of his playful, guilty imagination” in this glimpse into a brilliant novelist’s subconscious (The New York Times). Culled from nearly eight hundred pages of the author’s “dream diaries” kept between 1965 and 1989, this singular journal reveals “the feverish inner life of an intensely private man, providing an uncanny mirror-image of [his] novelistic obsessions, insecurities, and moral preoccupations” (Publishers Weekly). In what Greene calls My Own World—as opposed to the Common World of shared reality—he accompanies Henry James on a disagreeable riverboat trip to Bogota, is caught in a guerilla crossfire with Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, strolls in the Vatican garden with Pope John Paul II who’s doling out Perugina chocolates like hosts, offers refuge to a suicidal Charlie Chaplin, and stages a disastrous play in blank verse for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He also shares his headspace with Goebbels, Castro, Cocteau, Queen Elizabeth, D. H. Lawrence, and talking kittens. And the landscape is just as wide: from Nazi Germany to Haiti to West Africa to Bethlehem 1 AD and to Sweden where he seeks treatment for leprosy. Greene is a criminal, spy, lover, assassin, witness, and writer. Encompassing life, death, war, feuds, and career, and alternately absurdist, frightening, funny, and revealing, these fertile imaginings—many of which found their way into Greene’s fiction—comprise nothing less than “an alternate autobiography . . . a uniquely candid self-portrait” of one of the giants of English literature (Kirkus Reviews).

Reading the Early Modern English Diary

Reading the Early Modern English Diary
Author: Miriam Nandi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2021-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030423271

Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a time which considerably pre-dated the Romantic cult of the individual self. The book analyzes the connections between genre and self-articulation: How could the diary come to be associated with emotional self-expression given the tedium and repetitiveness of its early seventeenth-century ancestors? How did what were once mere lists of daily events evolve into narrative representations of inner emotions? What did it mean to write on a daily basis, when the proper use of time was a heavily contested issue? Reading the Early Modern Diary addresses these questions and develops new theoretical frameworks for discussing interiority and affect in early modern autobiographical texts.