“The present moment of the world” Perspectives on the writer’s journal from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century

Since its appearance in the literary field at the end of the nineteenth century, the writer’s journal has developed on the fringes of other genres, in an unresolved tension between sincerity and artificiality. The form has been the site of various experiments and, by the end of the twentieth century, had become a mode of self-narrative. Without neglecting these aspects, contemporary journals strive to transcribe everyday life, to enhance the perceptibility of the passage of time—to ultimately weave “a sort of novelistic underside.”