The diary with its regular, periodic entries plods along in unfolding life stories. The journal, similar to the diary, often involves greater intellectual exercise on the part of its creator. Epistolary diaries reflect a need for an audience, or suggest a discomfort with the self-centeredness of creating a personal record. Memoirs are often recollections which bury the self in the context of greater historical events or in the company of better known celebrities, while autobiographies focus on the self creating its own history. Autobiographical fiction suggests a continuing need to explore and re-examine the self, to experiment with different endings for life events, or to impose the self on other realities.
Essays insist on personal rationalization of world events and intellectual observations.
And the creative self uses scrapbooks, collecting bits and ephemeral pieces which visually enhance written expression. The diaries, scrapbooks, and other autobiographical efforts presented in this exhibition may be examined by combining these various factors of time, place, gender, intention, and genre. Some of these characters are of literary or historical import, others are nearly anonymous figures from the past. But each of them passes on the message that they, too, were real people with common human experiences. Back to text.