Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse (Suny Series, Literacy, Culture, and Learning : Theory and Practice)

Rating:
Summary: Journals and Diaries: key to discoveries
Review: The book presented in 262 pages and six chapters was published in 1992. It presents a critical approach about diaries and private journals. Cinthia sees since the beginning of tradition, the development and the use of this kind of writing in the academic and non academic areas. By using this approach, She performs a deep analysis of dicothomy male/famale, public/private. So, She built the whole understanding. For Gannett, the imaginary production that involves diaries as a female gender, trivial, of excessive sentimentalism and not really valued; and the private journals associated to a male writing and of a great value, has its origin in the historical difference of the linguistic speech and the relation with the men and women's writing. Always associated with female productions, according to Cinthia, the private diaries have been marginaled through many centuries. In the long run, this situation reflects the women social status and their limited roles in comparison to the men's ones. Because of that, Cinthia observes that if compared to men, the history registers a shorter number of private diaries or jornals written by women. But, for Cinthia, women should not be treated with indiference, and it still occurs. The author concludes that the status of bad writer was the result of the discrimination that women were submitted along the years. Relegating the woman to the private sfere meant to assure linguistic and politic hegemony for the man, says Cinthia. She concludes That "men have been the creators of the public writing forms and they have evaluated e controled the access to the educational system. It guarantees them the access to the public written speech". The use of jornals and diaries in the academic system is seen as a tool to access a long tradition of this kind of writing and to enable making questions about the social imaginary that was built around it. At the same time _ however, it still produces some kind of polemic: if classmates have or not their world invaded _ to permit men and women use it as a rich self-express material and a production of meaning. Reporting to the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, Cinthia says that "the relation between thought and word is an alive process", and for Cinthia and others researchers as Randall Freisinger & Petersen and Toby Fulwiler, "we believed that the language must be used in the classroom as a tool to discoveries and to complement the learning, not merely as a tool to report itself".

Rating:
Summary: An essential study
Review: What do you think of when you hear the word "diary"? Scribbling women? A secret book kept by young girls? Certainly not something written by men. After all, that thing Thoreau did all his writing in was a journal. Journals are serious. Diaries are juvenile, embarrassing.

It is these attitudes and assumptions which Cinthia Gannett explores in this fascinating and comprehensive book. Where do our ideas of journals and diaries come from? Who has used them, and how? How has the language we've adopted affected our use of these tools as writers, teachers, and readers?

This may be the most lucidly written scholarly book I've ever read, though I must admit I tend to avoid scholarly books because so few of them are lucidly written. Gannett is not afraid to put herself into these pages, to explore her own history and attitudes, and that's one of great qualities which makes this book so compelling to read. (Her ideas, and her presentation of those ideas, helps as well.)

Any teacher of any level -- college, secondary, elementary -- who uses journals or diaries in their classroom needs to read this book. You won't regret it.