The scope of the 2001 study has been maintained: Simonet-Tenant limits her corpus to hand-written, typed, or printed diaries that have been written in French. The addition of a fifth chapter, comprising interviews with three contemporary diarists, serves to remind readers of the enduring nature of the activity of diary writing, even as it points to the ways in which new media and technology are currently serving to inflect the practice. The new edition is prefaced with a foreword by Philippe Lejeune, and represents an updated and slightly expanded version of the 2001 edition. Genre litteraire et ecriture ordinaire, the first having been published in 2001 by Nathan. This is in fact the second edition of Le Journal intime. The publication in 1993 of Philippe Lejeune's groundbreaking Le Moi des Demoiselles effected a welcome shift in focus, positioning the journal not as the suspicious 'other' of literary texts, but as a cultural practice that signified within a context of other daily practices-for the jeunes filles whose diaries he carefully reads, such practices might range from performing their daily toilette to embroidering linen.įrancoise Simonet-Tenant's monograph inscribes itself within this shift of focus. While the genre was certainly not ignored by the French critical establishment prior to the 1990s, the studies devoted to it focused on the journal as text and not as practice: thus, on the one hand, the journal was represented as a means of extracting valuable insights into an individual's character (Leleu), or into the status of society as a whole (Girard) on the other, the genre was analyzed through reading habits cultivated through a long acquaintance with literary narrative, and labeled-perhaps inevitably-as passive and lacking in structure (Didier). Elle s’intéresse tout particulièrement aux écritures du moi ( Le journal intime, PUF Stendhal autobiographe, PUF) et aux questions. Elle a écrit de nombreux ouvrages, articles, contributions à des colloques sur la littérature française du XVIIIe et du XIXe. The past fifteen years or so have seen a marked growth in critical interest in the journal intime in France. Béatrice Didier est professeur émérite à l’École normale supérieure.

Beatrice didier.le journal intime