Chapter 6 Writing the self

1. AntarAbdellah Chapter 6 Writing the self

2. Introduction • This chapter focuses on the relationship between language use, creativity and the self. • The term ‘self’ is used to refer to the more internal, subjective experience of identity. • This chapter tries to answer the following questions : in what ways do we perform or create particular kinds of identity through writing? How do different readers and audiences contribute to this identity? • It focuses on four personal genres: diaries or journals, letter-writing, graffiti and web home pages which are usually addressed to specific audiences.

3. genre • The term ‘genre’ has the following meanings: • 1- Different types of literary texts, such as poetry, novels, plays. For instance the sub-genres of poetry involve lyric, epic, ballad and sonnet. • 2- Groups of spoken or written texts with a similar social purpose and formal characteristics, e.g. diaries, advertisements, jokes.

4. 1- Diary / Journal Writing • A diary is a daily record, especially a personal record of events, experiences, and observations; it is also referred to as a journal. Basically, a diary is a book for use in keeping a personal record, as of experiences. • Keeping a diary is an excellent means of documenting experiences and ideas that will have meaning later in life or possibly be of importance to the next generation. • In many instances, keeping a diary is something that people choose to do in secret.

5. Famous diaries • Among the most famous diaries of English literature are those of John Evelyn for 1641-1706; Samuel Pepys (1660-69) , perhaps the most valuable and minute record in existence Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella, 1710-13; • In the 20th century, the Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), the two-volume Journal of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner Andre' Gide (1869-1951), and the five-volume Diary of Virginia Woolf (1977-84) are among the most notable of examples.

6. Diaries have also provided a private space for the writer’s personal reflections. • The growth of literacy, the increasing interest in travel and public affairs and the self-examination encouraged by Protestantism all contributed to the growth of diary keeping from this period onwards. • In her journals Dorothy expresses her own romantic sensibility and love of nature • and she also defines herself through her love for her brother. In another direct link between journal entry and poems, pp…..

7. Journal writing is an intensely private activity, providing an intimate record. • There is always, however, a sense of addressing someone else — an absent or imaginary friend, a neglectful lover, oneself, God or ‘posterity’. • Some diaries, such as those of travellers and politicians, may he written with publication in mind. • In view of Erving Goffman (1959) , people have a ‘front stage’ style, a public persona designed to make a good impression on others, and also a more private ‘back stage style’ in places where they can relax their behavior, reflect more openly and prepare their public ‘front’.

8. A-The back-stage self • Comment on the hand written diary, p.

9. Internet blogs • The Increasingly popular medium for diary writing is the internet. Whereas the secrets of paper diaries can be closely guarded, weblogs or ‘blogs’ are potentially open to millions of readers, even though they often contain surprisingly intimate details of the writer’s everyday life. • Authors may write entries about their everyday lives, world events, interesting material they have found on the web, or on specific expert topics. • Because of the immediacy with which a blog can be updated, they can play an important part in the fast dissemination of news and information around the internet. • For instance, during and after the 11September 2001attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, stories, photographs and movies posted on their blogs by people near to Ground Zero rivaled what was available in the mainstream media. (Bausch et al., 2002)

10. What kind of potential do blogs offer for creative uses of language and identity work? • Examples from internet diaries , pp.

11. comment • The extracts includes two imaginary dialogues he made up to convey what life was like in Baghdad. In what ways does Pax use language artfully draw creatively on the sociohistorical context and the affordances of the internet to get his message across in these postings? How might Pax’s weblog be contributing to his identity? • Noticeably, Pax is using word play to create social connection, both with Raed’ through the palindrome ‘dear_raed’ and the made-up word ‘Arablish’, an mixture of ‘Arabic’ and ‘English’.

12. Pax’s parody of programming language conveys the surreal nature of life in pre-war Baghdad. • The anonymity of the web enables Pax to criticize both the Ba’athist regime and the western powers, for instance suggesting an ironic parallel between the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s 1991invasion of Kuwait, in a context where voicing criticism in the real world would have been highly dangerous. • This anonymity ,however, raises questions for others about whoPax is and about whether he exists at all.

13. As his fame grows, he expresses discomfort and fear about his safety especially when people start quoting him as an authority. In addition to Pax’s projection of himself as witty courageous in his criticism of both Bush and Saddam Hussein and friendly to ‘non-Arablish’ people, the identity of The Baghdad Blogger’ emerged through the responses of others and the appropriation of his writing into new generic forms. • Worth being emphasized is that journal writing has always been in some sense dialogic, that is, responding to others and addressed to others, and journals have always had the potential to be readdressed to wider audiences.

14. 2 The art of letter writing • This section focuses on personal letter writing, which is the most basic written genre and the root of other more complex generic forms. • The art of letter writing has also long been a subject for instruction and amusement. • Letter-writing manuals and collections of letters have been published in Britain since the 16thcentury. • An individual letter was expected to conform to the classical rhetorical structure, and Day provided his own sample letters with the different sections marked.

15. Examples included ‘A conciliatory epistle of the third sort, wherein a gentlewoman is comforted on the death of her husband slain in the wars’ • although The English Secretorie is an instruction manual, behind a series of love letters later in the book a story of misunderstanding, jealousy, envy and reconciliation. • From the outset, letters could be used both for functional purposes and as a fictional form for pleasure and entertainment

16. Personal letters • P. • Rosewarne and his mother become emblems of patriotic national identity. • One of the most striking differences in ‘writing the self’ through letters is their more intensely dialogic nature. • As with journals, the initial focus on polite form was gradually replaced with more emphasis on the potential within personal correspondence for individual expression and intimate relationship.

17. Letters have the capacity to overcome barriers of distance and space and can transform absence into presence. • A letter reflects its intended audience, the ‘drag of the face on the other side of the page’, as Virginia Woolf [1940]puts it. • A letter has a formal opening and closing, yet it can be elliptical and open-ended, referring implicitly to other letters within a chain of correspondence.

18. Reading A • Margaretta Jolly focuses on a point in British history when the practice of private letter writing reached a peak of popularity. She explores the possibilities for creativity within the everyday letters of ordinary people and argues that the ambiguity of the personal letter, as both communication and creation, produces a ‘distinctive aesthetic of the everyday’. • Letter writers may use language artfully to present personal experience.

19. Like diaries, letters can become recontextualized within books which are treated as ‘literature’. Although a piece of writing is partly defined as a particular genre from the inside through its structure and style, it also depends on social recognition and value as that genre, from the outside. • The letter genre also has the potential for artful use within fiction, first in early parodies of the letter- writing manuals and then in epistolatory novels

20. 3 Writing on the wall • This section, is concerned about the relationship between writing, creativity and identity. First, it investigates the artfulness of graffiti, at the level of both text and interaction. • What can be noticed is that the absurdity produced by • morphological punning in the first line is developed further • by two subsequent writers, who imitate a rational argument using the parallel pun. • This kind of ‘dialogical creativity’ emerges through the relationship between individual contributions.

21. As far as the playful aspects of graffiti in English is concerned, puns and contradictory voices are worth being considered. • In fact, these features stress the importance of how graffiti is written in relation to its meaning and significance, and point out its inherently oppositional nature. • Opposition is expressed through the illegitimacy of the graffiti act itself, through the content of the message and through stylistic features, for instance the use of non-standard spelling and punctuation which create a symbolic distance from authority.

22. In addition to the traditional graffiti, a new, rather more colorful form has been appearing on city landscapes since the 1970s. Both writing and art form, letters and names are spray-painted in a decorative calligraphy which is often not legible. • Spray-can graffiti has now developed into a distinctive subculturalpractice. • Moje[2000, p. 651] describes how marginalized youth in Salt Lake City have appropriated gang writing styles, spelling rules and dress codes to ‘claim a space, construct an identity and take on a social position in their worlds’. For these youth, who have not found value in mainstream culture, graffiti is ‘a state of mind and a sign of respect’.

23. A- The spray-can is mightier than the sword (Reading B) • Nancy Macdonald draws on her ethnographic study of young graffiti writers in London and New York so as to explain how graffiti writing plays a central role in the construction of a particular kind of young masculine identity. • Nancy Macdonald suggests that the illegality of graffiti is a central defining feature of the trials of courage and daringwhich establish these graffiti writers’ respect, status and fame within their subculture.

24. She suggests that some writers express sides of themselves in their graffiti which are not evident in the rest of their lives. • These emerge particularly through the creative aspects of graffiti, including the materiality, shape and design of the script. • Like a medieval manuscript, it communicates multimodally; i.e. through both the text and its decoration. • The placing of graffiti on fast- moving trains, or on buildings to stand out proud against the city landscape, brings this identity to life and gives it power and

25. Graffiti writers have their own criteria for judging the quality of particular tags or pieces and the effectiveness of their placing, but graffiti writing is often seen by mainstream society as a destructive rather than a creative act: it ‘defaces’ public places. • Some older writers make the transition into legality and respectability through: legal painting sites, eventually reaching a wider audience through exhibitions and coverage in specialist graffiti magazines and more general art magazines.

27. 4-Constructing the virtual self [Homepage] • One of the genres on the web most explicitly connected with constructing the self is the personal homepage • It is different from a weblog in being primarily an ‘all about me’ collection of biographical details, • interests, ideas, taste, beliefs and so on, rather than a journal with regular postings . • It has been argued that representing oneself on a home page relieves some of the pressures of self-presentation in face-to-face interaction, in that there is more time to assemble a ‘front’ to present to the world.

28. Therefore, homepages seem to be the ultimate multimodal text in many ways. Texts and images are reframed by the author who can highlight or re-accent’ particular aspects of their meanings. • Chandler describes the typical practice of authoring as a kind of bricolage (i.e. a patchwork of items put together from whatever is available), whereby creativity and identity are expressed through the ways in which collected items are recombined and through hypertext links rather than through the construction of original text and images. • He suggests that this re-use of existing materials undermines romantic notions of creativity which focus on individual originality.

29. Conclusion • This chapter has explored the ways in which a number of genres provide opportunities for the expression and construction of the self. • diaries, letters and graffiti are transformed into more publicly valued genres. • Through their appropriation into more prestigious genres, texts can take on a life of their own. • The dialogic nature of texts is reflected within their different levels of verbal structure. • These dialogic features are linked with other creative uses of language which are found in these everyday genres: ornamental calligraphy, word play, imagery, irony, parody and rhetorical devices such as three-part lists.

30. Graffiti and the web are ostensibly public, but offer particular opportunities for privacy and anonymity. • Through recontextualisation, hybridisation and intertextuality texts combine and are transformed into other kinds of texts, with new workings of the private/public relationship, new values and new possibilities for authorial identities.