Telling a Life – Diaries in novel writing

The form of the diary is normally regarded as the genuine narrative of life. But what happens when this very personal narrative of a life is used in a novel, a fictional text? In this seminar we want to work with two very different texts, both of which are centred around a diary:
In Asta’s Book by Barbara Vine (a pen name of Ruth Rendell) Asta, a Danish woman in England at the beginning of the 20th century is hopeful but lonely in a foreign country, until she confides the mundanities of her life to a diary: worries about her sons, difficulties with her husband, her move, unexpected prosperity and approaching war. Not an easy fate, were it not for Swanny, her favourite daughter, who stands faithfully by her mother's side. But is mother's favourite even mother's? Asta raises doubts that threaten to break Swanny and trigger probing questions from those around her. Ann Eastbrook, the granddaughter, finally discovers legendary connections between Asta's
now published and famous diaries and a spectacular murder trial. What if this family, which has come to honour thanks to the diaries, also had a skeleton in its closet?

A diary also takes centre stage in the novel ‘The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde’. In this case, however, it is a fictitious diary of a character who existed as a historical person: The author and dandy Oscar Wilde.

Through the fictional diary, Ackroyd creates a parallel world in which genres such as biography and novel, and thus
ultimately reality and fiction, begin to blur.

 

Beide Bücher sind auch in deutscher Übersetzung erhältlich. Die Lektüre zum Semesterschwerpunkt Asta's Book sollte zu Beginn des Seminars bereits gelesen sein.