Ong's descriptoin of the relationship between an author and an audience led me to think about a journal entry. According to Ong, all audiences are fictional because an author does not directly interact with any person through the written word. It was his last paragraph that made me think, well why not a journal? You write a journal to interact with yourself.
This epiphany was came about directly after reading about Ong's description of the trend of confessional writing. Ong says, "Observant literary critics and psychiatrists, however, do not need to be told that confessional literature is likely to wear the most masks of all" (21). I thought, absolutely not. A journal entry must be the most pure form of writing. Your audience is, after all, yourself.
Seconds later I shot down my epiphany with this thought: When you write a journal, you imagine someone reading it. Maybe that someone is yourself, your parents, your friends, or the whole world. Your honesty is sugarcoated. You describe events as you wish you had experienced them, describe emotions as more poetic and picturesque. And so, I would like to propose that it is journal-keeping that has truly the most fictional audience. The author, in this case, intentionally imagines an audience that will most likely never read his or her written words. And if the author reads the words, he or she will know not to completely believe what he or she reads in the first place.
This is actually from Kaitlyn (still having commenting trouble):
ReplyDeleteJaylyn,
I can certainly see both sides of your thought process. Journal entries can be both the most honest form of writing and the most blatant example of fictional writing. I still see it as more honest writing than not, though. My reason for that is because when I'm writing a journal entry, I may be embellishing only for the sake of having a text unlike what I write for my professors. It certainly reads as more poetic and picturesque than an academic paper may, but being that I am my only audience in a journal entry, I know my own writing style. I understand that I'm writing all these lines unlike how I actually think. So the writing will appear pompous to other readers, but they weren't my intended target audience. So what's honest to me might not be honest to them.
It'd be interesting to see how different readers would view a journal entry that's completely embellished only for embellishment's sake.
Kaitlyn