THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL I AND ITS FUNCTIONS: WRITE LIFE FOR WHAT AND FOR WHOM

Abstract

ABSTRACT
Writing about yourself is a very ancient practice. Despite the fact that intimate writing practice is ancient, its recurrence is still very current, spanning from the more traditional supports, such as paper, to the new technological media such as the internet. Iteven got the scientific research status with investigations of Philippe Lejeune, dedicated to the study of the subject since 1970. In this research, we will also lean on the intimate writing, investigating more closely a genre of autobiographical sphere: the personal diary. The scribe of diary sees in it a confidant. It is a way to record the feelings and sensations of times that need to be immortalized in the view of who writes them. When analyzing this genre, we take into account its intimate character: it is made of an invisible practice, so you almost never know about someone who writes diary; you can almost never see them; rarely read them, especially if the author is alive. In it, the subject reports what is most intimate; sometimes, what he does not have the courage to tell anyone, so often it is forbidden the access of any person to them. Because of this intimate character, the personal diary caught our attention and invited us to investigate it more closely, holding our attention in the selection of topics to be written, when choosing certain linguistic elements to set it up, in the roles that the subject assumes within the genre, in the presence of inserted visuals in these texts, such as product packaging, pictures etc. In short, we seek to investigate the linguistic and/or discursive elements inserted by two subjects in diaries written in an attempt to learn more about them and their relationship to language, which leads us to know a little more about the genre itself. To achieve our goals, we analyzed three dairiesmanually written by two different subjects, both female, referenced herein by the initials of their first names: K. and C. The first scribe is 25 years old, is single and is studying Nutrition; the second is 30 years old, is divorced, has two children and has recently completed the third year of high school dedicated to Youth and Adult Education - EJA. Theoretically, we were wrappedby the designing gender postulated by Bakhtin (1997), whose vision does not exclude the possibility of the emergence of an individual style. It happens, but there are generic types that best provide its emergence and development. We wanted to know, with our analysis, if the personal diary would be a more standardized gender or whether if it would allow the subject to the expression of his individuality without many obstacles. We were also immersed in the extensive investigations of the French researcher Philippe Lejeune (1971, 1997, 2006, 2007 and 2014) about ordinary people autobiographies. About the concept of subject, we sought subsidies in Freudian psychoanalysis and studies of Lacan. Our investigations indicate that the writing composition of these diaries is different in several aspects, from the formal and structural concept of the genre to the function it represents to the scribes. In this sense, each scribe presented peculiar faces and it caused us to prove Bakhtin's theory that there are more standardized genres and more malleable ones that allow more subjective inputs, and the diaryis one very flexible genre. Even so, we could prove appearances of the unconscious in these activities.