Panel: Beyond the Autobiographical Pact: New Approaches to the Work of
Philippe LeJeune
Copanelists: Susanna Egan and Jeremy D. Popkin
In the English language, Philippe Lejeune is most famous for “the autobiographical pact,” a paradigm designed to describe how truth claims in an autobiographical text work to shape the genre. But Lejeune’s later work on diaries and other types of “ordinary” life writing shows a marked departure from the methods of his earlier work, as he became more interested in alternate methods for collecting, analyzing, and theorizing about the recording of everyday experience.
In popular culture studies, there is an established way to theorize everyday experience in light of corporatization, whether it is via the work of Michel de Certeau on tactics, John Fiske’s paradigm of centrifugal and centripetal cultural movements, or the work of Jan Radway on reading as a negotiation of gender norms. In this paper I will argue that the recent work of Philippe Lejeune has much to add to the debates in popular culture scholarship about the meaning and representation of daily experience, particularly in its focus on diary writing by non-professional writers, the politics of early online writing by young girls, and finally, the phenomenology of engaging in diary-writing as a researcher and as a practitioner within the cultural field.
Julie Rak is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (U of British Columbia P, 2004), the editor of Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005). With Jeremy Popkin, she is editing a new translation of Philippe Lejeune’s works called On Diary (forthcoming, U of Hawai‘i P). With Andrew Gow, she edited Mountain Masculinity: The Life and Writings of Nello “Tex” Vernon Wood in the Canadian Rockies, 1911–1938 (forthcoming, Athabasca UP). She is completing a book titled Industrial Identity: Memoir and Biography for Mass Markets for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.