Once a writer is proclaimed an author, Foucault famously argued, we (especially we scholars) start asking what exactly among their writings counts as a “work.” A diary? A letter? How about a shopping list? Our grounds for classification are not always clear, even to ourselves. Squarely in the gray zone, writer’s notes and notebooks—cached in diaries or in journals, typed like Samuel Butler’s, or scrawled like Darwin’s—are the subject of Simon Reader’s deep and thought-provoking first book. Although Reader does not explore what readers might make of similar notes and notebooks without a canonized author attached, that may make for a revealing complementary test-case.
Because “the mainstream of the discipline is not equipped with intricate ways of describing notes and notebooks as literary art,” Reader proposes to fill the void with “a simple argument: the writer’s notebook encloses a genre equal in importance to the novel, poem, drama, or...
University of California Press