The genre personal diary: how the intimate is built

Abstract

According to Bakhtin (1997), is as the genre entered into a speech, linked to certain field of human activity, that the subject of language and appropriates constitutes. Some of these fields have more close with the daily activities of individuals than others and produce more malleable, genres that allow greater individual interventions, as in the case of personal journal. Due to the intimate character of this genre, it attracted our attention and invited us to examine it more closely. In this paper, we investigate the personal diary genre, from the analysis of two documents written by ordinary people, in an attempt to learn a little bit more about the genre, of the writers and how their relationship with the language. To this end, two adults female people, provided us with their personal logs for analysis. Theoretically, we rely on the assumptions of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997) on the genres of discourse and the work developed by researcher Philippe Lejeune (2008) about autobiographical texts written by ordinaries people. The analysis of the diaries showed that, in addition to record experiences and feelings of the people, they were used as instrument of prayer to one of the person and as a means of creating a public image of himself, to the other.