Fictionalizing Acts in Hawthorne's American notebooks

Abstract

This thesis explores processes of fictionalization in the American Notebooks, a volume of diaries written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and first published in 1868. The idea of approaching diaries from the perspective of the fictive comes as a response to common sense and critical views of diaristic writing that consider it as a transparent and mimetic form of representation. Alternatively, it shall be argued that Hawthornes American Notebooks reveal indirect and non-mimetic forms of rendering the world, which will be analyzed within the framework of Wolfgang Isers literary anthropology. Such methodology will provide the key concepts used in the analysis of those indirect forms of representation, namely, the fictive, the real and the acts of boundary-crossing selection, combination, self-disclosure and doubling. The fictive is understood here as an intentional act that transforms the real into a sign, and the acts of boundary-crossing are the different types of relationships established between that real and the imagined. Among the processes of fictionalization that shall be discussed in light of these concepts are the recourse to literary, religious and political discourses to interpret experiences, the evocation of the visual arts in landscape descriptions, and the metacommentary. Such processes of fictionalization will, in turn, be related to periods and traditions in the history of literature and aesthetics, such as Romanticism, the Picturesque and Transcendentalism. The parallels drawn between Hawthornes diaries and these thought systems will open the text to its context, and reveal a dialogue with the visual arts. These parallels shall eventually bring about a realization of the variety and complexity of signifying procedures in Hawthornes AN. Additionally, they shall enable us to question generic principles and definitions with regard to diaries.