Paweł Rodak
A WRITER’S DIARY: BETWEEN EVERYDAY WRITING PRACTICE AND LITERATURE
The article proposes an analysis of the diary through the prism of a conception of the diary in which it is treated as an everyday writing practice – acting in words – according to which the newly composed text is only one element of it; the remaining elements are performative-functional (the place the diary occupies in the writer’s life and its functions) and material (the diary’s carrier, its material structure, appearance). Using the three categories (practice, material, text) the author gives a thorough characteristics of personal diaries, every time paying special attention to the peculiarity of writers’ diaries. Light is shed on the important role of motivation for diary writing and on the function the diary performs (e.g. recording one’s writing, a chronicle of a creative work, the writer’s creative workshop, l’atelier d’écriture, creative archive, autotematic, self-critical and critical practice, creation of a literary text). The author pays attention to the function of a diary carrier (e.g. notebooks, loose pieces of paper) and to an important practice of rewriting and amending of notes in some writer’s diaries – an evidence of changing a personal writing into a literary text. The author suggests his own typology of writer’s diaries comprising private diaries, writing diaries, and literary diaries.