Jones's Diary Research Articles

'These Chicks are Damaged Goods': The Abject Female Body in Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Warner's The Sopranos

The female body as a disruptive force was a dominant topic in the popular culture and literature of the 1990s, as well as in debates of the postfeminist theorists of the decade. As culture began to constantly scrutinise women’s bodies and obsessively fixate on unhealthy thinness and perpetual youth, an idealistic model of the female body was conceptualised: self-contained, perfectly smooth, with no biological functions or needs (vide McRobbie 57-8). Due to the impossibility of meeting these voyeuristic standards, the uncomfortable biological reality of womanhood has been perceived as deserving of societal degradation and unyielding control. This essay will examine the nature of Kristevan's abjection of female bodies in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1997) and Alan Warner’s The Sopranos (1999). I shall follow the thesis of Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price, which delineates the relationship between the physicality of the female body and the negative perception of women, outlined as such: ‘the body has a propensity to leak, to overflow the proper distinctions between self and other, to contaminate and engulf. Thus, women themselves are, in the conventional masculinist imagination, not simply inferior beings whose civil and social subordination is both inevitable and justified, but objects of fear and repulsion’ (3). I will argue that the female protagonists of these novels are unwilling to reject their corporeality despite its negative connotations; however, due to the all-encompassing nature of their patriarchal environments, they are unable to liberate themselves from the oppressive demarcations of female abjection.

Study on the Translation of Verbal Humor in Bridget Jones’s Diary from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Humor is a common phenomenon in daily life. Essentially, it is a special form of verbal communication. Since humor bears special language and cultural characteristics, the difficulty of translation is self-evident for translators. For many years, the translatability and untranslatability of humor have been the focus of the argument among scholars. Relevance theory attempts to explain the mechanism of humor generation and its translation from the perspective of cognition. Under the framework of relevance theory, this paper takes Bridget Jones's Diary and its Chinese version as the research object to explore the translation strategies of verbal humor, and evaluate whether the Chinese translation can represent the same humorous effect as the original. The results show that the translator adopts direct and indirect translation strategies when translating verbal humor, and the translation strategies have effectively achieved the same humorous effect as the original to some extent if the target language readers share the similar cognitive environment with the source language readers in some situations. Nevertheless, the humorous effects may not be fully conveyed in the target texts, especially when translating culturally loaded words and idiomatic expressions. In such cases, the author puts forward some tentative suggestions for improving the translated texts. The study makes an attempt to provide a feasibility analysis for the studies on translation of verbal humor in diary novels.

Movie Media: Misrepresentation of Homosexual Characters Within Comedy Films Since the 80s Caused by Heterosexist Ideals in the Acting and Directing Process

Critical discourse analysis is a qualitative research approach used to study social inequalities, in which it creates the connection between social practices and the social context. The use of film analysis variables of non-discourse and discourse practices relating to this analysis approach was examined from one film representative of each decade; the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The heterosexism found within the acting and directing process of films within the comedy genre while structuring a gay character in screenplay was examined through the research process by honing in on specific variables. The conducted study’s research process involved multiple viewings of each movie: Victor/Victoria, Clueless, and Bridget’s Jones Diary where 3 scenes were chosen from the film regarding variables such as materialisations, speech, and actions that held correlation to the portrayal of a homosexual character. By the film variables directly corresponding with the characterization, the research analysis demonstrated heterosexist actor’s and director’s choices throughout the filming process and their correlation to common stereotypes against homosexuals being drawn off of for comedic effect. Over the span of 3 decades, the use of stereotypes within homosexual movie media representation; although progressive towards inclusion, has strictly portrayed such characters in comical, non-serious scenes. It is with a comparison of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s take on gay portrayals that the founded extremity of the use of such common stereotypes was recognized as they continuously, negatively impact the LGBTQ community through the continuation of use constituting these portrayed personas as correct.

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary StudiesCharacter as Form

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary StudiesCharacter as Form

Working Title Films and Universal: The Integration of a British Production Company into a Hollywood Studio

Working Title Films is arguably the most successful and well-known production company in Britain today. For over 30 years, it has produced a diverse range of critically and commercially successful British films including romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), family films like Bean (1997) and Nanny McPhee (2005) and dramas including Atonement (2007) and The Theory of Everything (2014). For the majority of its history, however, Working Title has been defined in business terms by its status as a subsidiary of one of two multinational media conglomerates, PolyGram (1992–8) and Universal (1998–present). The transition between the two began when PolyGram, and its film studio, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (PFE), was sold to Seagram, the parent company of Universal. This article examines Working Title's integration into Universal and the evolving media ecology which shaped the processes of development, green-lighting, production, marketing and distribution at play within and between both companies between 1998 and 2006. In these respects, Working Title's transition between parent companies is a narrative of both continuity and change. Significantly, three key stages of gatekeeping remained common to both the PFE and Universal eras: development, green-lighting and distribution. The institutional perimeters within which these points of decision-making occurred, however, changed considerably. The article concludes by considering the impact of such structures and processes on the films which Working Title produced, particularly their various representations of Britain and ‘Britishness’.

Doris Lessing's eds. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer

Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, eds. Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Pp. xi, 221. CAD $90. The introduction to Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty, written by editors Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, opens with an acknowledgement of Lessing's irritation at having her landmark novel misread by many and reviewers at time of its publication, in 1962. In 1971, Lessing famously reacted to audience's response in a preface that is included in all subsequent reprintings of The Golden Notebook. After explaining concept of breakdown as self-healing, inner self's dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, Lessing writes: But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because book was instantly belittled ... as being about sex war (8). She asserts that the essence of book, organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalize (Lessing 10). Despite Lessing's instruction and her stated objections to analytical critique, contributors to compilation challenge Lessing's interpretation of her own novel, approaching The Golden Notebook from a variety of angles, even against authorial authority itself (Ridout et al. 3). Unsurprisingly, Lessing's warning against division is similarly unheeded, given novel's length and thematic and formal complexity. In Julie Cairnie's words, critics carve up The Golden Notebook according to our own proclivities (19). The collection, put together to celebrate Lessing's after five decades, is afforded [j]ust over a half-century of chronological distance from novel and its mid-fifties setting and preoccupations, which enables new geopolitical, theoretical, social, aesthetic, and autobiographical approaches through which to appreciate and reevaluate this ever-provocative text (3). Cairnie discusses sections set in Rhodesia in 1940s and their relevance to black and white Zimbabwean women writers; Ridout makes a delightful comparison between Tlte Golden Notebook and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, and Jonah Raskin reminiscences about a day spent interviewing Lessing on a bed in an old farmhouse. In these examples alone, collection addresses vastly diverse topics, all circling Lessing and her novel, which continues to challenge, surprise, and inspire twentieth-century readers (9). The book includes a comprehensive introduction and twelve contributions from established and emerging scholars across several generations and nationalities--American, Canadian, British, Australian (3). The pieces range in topic and approach, are categorized into three parts, and clearly demonstrate that Lessing's novel still has much to offer contemporary criticism over fifty years after its creation. In Part I, Politics and Geopolitics, four contributors discuss political aspects of Lessing's novel--the African setting of black notebook (Cairnie), nuclear deterrence and Cold War as important to book's narrative (Mark Pedretti, Cornelius Collins), and a discussion of feminism and homosexuality/homophobia in (Singer)--from a contemporary viewpoint and trace implications of The Golden Notebook past time of its publication and into book's future. Pedretti's Doris Lessing and Madness of Nuclear Deterrence is one of most compelling pieces in collection. He focuses on an area that is largely ignored in previous scholarship about text: importance of nuclear bomb. …

Communication Technology and Narrative: Letters, Instant Messaging, and Mobile Phones in Three Romantic Novels

How time and place are constructed in the novel and how readers perceive these features have been studied extensively. Less attention has been devoted to how communicative devices, such as letters, electronic messaging, or telephone calls, can influence both time and place by connecting characters in different locations. This article argues that the technical capabilities of different communication systems, when represented within a novel's story world, help determine the forms of plot, characterization, and narrative voice that a novelist can feasibly present. To demonstrate this, the argument compares three novels that share the generic conventions of romantic fiction: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Helen Fielding's modern adaptations of Austen, Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999). Each novel depicts potential lovers who are initially seen as socially incompatible in that they live or work in dissimilar places. In all three texts, communication systems help connect the characters and bridge the environments in which they normally reside, thereby allowing romance to develop. However, the speed, reliability, and materiality of the different types of technology available in their respective historical periods radically affect how their plots are expressed. Letters, instant messaging, and mobile telephony are “semiotic resources” that the novelist can use to structure her plot and narrative voice.

Reading the Marriage Plot

Novels from the 18th and 19th centuries have powerfully shaped modern conceptions of marriage and family life. With the development of the British realist novel, the courtship and marriage plot took on a new cultural prominence that “naturalized” a deeply cultural institution and normalized a particular set of heterosexual gender roles. The cultural significance of these novels can be measured by their reverberations in contemporary popular culture and their impact on modern life stories. Jane Austen's (1813/2002) Pride and Prejudice and Helen Fielding's (1996) popular adaptation of Austen's novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, offer family theorists and researchers a case study on the influence of canonical plot structures on modern stories about marriage.

‘… there's no music playing, and it's not snowing’

This article looks at the use of pre-existing pop songs in romantic comedies by production company Working Title (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary, Love Actually, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) and shows how, especially in Love Actually and the two Bridget Jones films, the characters themselves, but by implication and filmic design also the films, make use of these songs and ridicule them at the same time. This self-reflexive use of music is discussed on the background of the films' construction of Englishness, but also set in the context of the history of romantic comedies and their uses of self-reflexivity.

Authenticity, confession and female sexuality: from Bridget to Bitchy

Bitchy Jones's Diary (2006–2010) was the pseudonymous blog of a female British blogger, who wrote about her life as a sexually dominant female, and criticised aspects of both mainstream and BDSM culture.1 The blog's title and the author's nom de plume were both deliberately adapted from Bridget Jones's Diary, a popular novel from 1996 which was later followed by a sequel and two films. The views of female sexuality expressed in the blog are to be understood as the antithesis of those presented in the novel. In this article, I take seriously the suggested connection between Bitchy and Bridget Jones, suggesting that these two female diarists have more in common than Bitchy might wish to acknowledge. Both use a variety of rhetorical strategies to create the impression that they are giving an authentic account of a marginalised subject position, and use this ‘authentic’ voice to denounce mainstream and subcultural attempts to exclude as worthless or irrelevant aspects of their sexual tastes, practices and experiences. I investigate the feminist potential and risks of this use of the authentic as a political weapon and conclude that, while claims to authenticity are problematic, the very fact that we debate these varying subject positions opens up new ways of thinking about female sexual subjectivity.

Chick Lit in the Undergraduate Classroom

Chick Lit in the Undergraduate Classroom Cheryl A. Wilson (bio) "Readers call a book good when they find it useful," asserts Charlotte Templin in her study of literary pedagogy and the canon, "The Male-Dominated Curriculum in English: How Did We Get Here and Where are We Going?" She continues, explaining the politics behind such value judgments, "Instead of asking 'How good is it?' we must ask 'Good for what?' or 'Good for whom?' Judgments about quality are not the objective property of texts, but are contingent: they are the political judgments of individuals and, as such, a function of their tastes, interests, and beliefs."1 The genre known as "chick lit," a category of contemporary women's fiction that emerged in the 1990s with works including Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, has been plagued by such judgments and has sparked much debate in the popular press. This debate tends to take issue with two aspects of the genre, its status as literature and its relationship to feminism, and the recent infiltration of the academy by chick lit has further intensified these concerns. Nonetheless, the genre has begun to make inroads with the publication of a handful of critical articles, Caroline Smith's Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Contemporary Women's Popular Fiction (2007), and Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young's critical anthology Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction (2006).2 The very questions concerning literature and feminism that make chick lit problematic for scholars and cultural critics, however, make the genre quite suitable for the undergraduate classroom, particularly for those instructors committed to feminist pedagogy both within and beyond women's studies classes. Indeed, as Brenda Bethman notes in "Chick Lit 101," where she lists a handful of faculty who use chick lit in their classrooms, along with their course titles, "Slowly, however, the study of chick lit is gaining popularity among Women's Studies scholars."3 The inherently interdisciplinary nature of the chick-lit genre and its connection to critical discussions about literature and feminism provide a variety of creative and interactive teaching opportunities, while also creating [End Page 83] the sense of "relevance" that bell hooks identifies as essential to the feminist classroom when she asserts that teachers need to be willing "to acknowledge a connection between ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices."4 bell hooks articulates her theory of feminist pedagogy in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and acknowledges the difficulty of reaching students in a postfeminist world: "Right now teachers and students face new challenges in the feminist classroom. Our students are no longer necessarily already committed to or interested in feminist politics."5 hooks and many other theorists also emphasize the need for feminist classrooms in which student perspectives are validated, multiple approaches are employed, and patriarchal value systems are deconstructed.6 Ultimately, these writers argue, any classroom can be a feminist classroom. Chick lit, a genre characterized by "resiliency and adaptability," can certainly facilitate the creation of dynamic and interdisciplinary feminist spaces within an undergraduate curriculum. 7 With its primarily white, middle-class, heterosexual heroines, much chick lit, including the texts discussed here, Bridget Jones's Diary and Confessions of a Shopaholic, seems to jar with feminist pedagogy's commitment, as articulated by hooks, to "cultural diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms."8 In addition, as Ferriss and Young point out in the Chronicle of Higher Education, chick lit embodies generational conflicts among women: For some of us who identify ourselves as feminist professors, the concerns of young women represent a betrayal—not only of our academic work, but of our life's work. Why are they worrying about their appearance more than their education? Dressing for sex, not success? Understandably embittered at the rejection of their most cherished ideals, many professors prefer to ignore or dismiss students' concerns—and certainly prefer not to teach the literature they believe glorifies what they so strongly resent.9 However, for Brenda Bethman chick lit provides an opportunity to bridge that gender gap: "While we may...

Sexual subjectification and Bitchy Jones's Diary

This article presents the reflections of two academics on the blog Bitchy Jones's Diary (2006–2010), particularly its considerations of dominant femininity within the UK kink communities. Weaving together excerpts from the blog with our own dialogues, we consider the potentials of such a voice from within the communities in relation to more academic explorations. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between Bitchy Jones's arguments and our own understandings of limited sexualised femininities available within wider culture, the place of agency within these and the potentials for mutual recognition within both kinky and non-kinky relationships.

Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary: sex blogging, community-building and feminism(s)

The four articles in this section are united by their analyses of the links between three phenomena: female-authored web blogging; questions of sexual identity and community construction; and debat...

Implicatures in film: Construal and functions in Bridget Jones romantic comedies

Drawing on insights from relevance theory, film studies, and multimodality, this paper offers a study of implicature in the polysemiotic context of films. A cognitive-pragmatic definition of implicature is proposed where relevance-theoretic concepts are adapted accordingly to cater for the semiotic complexity of film communication. The present case-study explores the construal and functions of the implicatures identified in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). It is demonstrated that implicatures are not conveyed by the film dialogue alone but, rather, via the co-deployment of verbal and non-verbal cinematic signifiers. Implicatures in the two romantic comedies have been found to fulfill comedic and/or narrative functions in tandem with mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and/or non-verbal soundtrack. In particular, implicatures emerge as an organic element of the two films because of their multifaceted contribution to the creation of humour, intimacy between the protagonists and plot per se.

Rewriting The Romance

In the last 10 years popular publishing has been transformed by the development of a number of new genres that have claimed to “rewrite” contemporary romances. Many publishers have launched new imprints with more sexually explicit titles aimed at women (e.g. Black Lace), have commissioned fictions that deliberately build on the popularity of TV shows like Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, and have marketed new subgenres such as “mum lit,” “lad lit,” and “dad lit.” Chief amongst these new genres is the phenomenon of chick lit, which burst onto the publishing scene in the wake of the extraordinary success of Helen Fielding's (1996) Bridget Jones's Diary. The focus of this paper is on how chick lit should be understood. Is chick lit “rewriting” the romance? Do chick lit novels offer new versions of heterosexual partnerships? How different are their constructions of femininity and masculinity from those of “traditional” popular romances such as those published by Harlequin or Mills and Boon? To what extent do these novels break with conventional formulas, and how, if at all, are they positioned in relation to feminist ideas and concerns. In order to address these questions the paper is divided into two main parts. In the first section, a review of feminist writing on popular romance is presented, which outlines the different perspectives on romantic fiction and explores the extraordinary tenacity of notions of heterosexual romance against the backdrop of significant cultural and demographic changes, including divorce on a hitherto unprecedented scale, an increase in the number of single person households, and a diversification of family forms (including stepfamilies, lesbian and gay families, and the notion of “friends as the new family”). The second section offers a detailed analysis of twenty chick lit novels published between 1997 and 2004, examining constructions of sexuality, beauty, independence, work, and singleness. The paper concludes that chick lit articulates a distinctively post-feminist sensibility characterised by an emphasis on neo-liberal feminine subjectivities and self-surveillance and monitoring; the notion of the (sexual) body as the key source of identity for women; discourses of boldness, entitlement, and choice (usually articulated to normative femininity and/or consumerism); and a belief in the emotional separateness of men's and women's worlds. It is also characterised by an entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist discourses.

The diagnosis of art: Rachmaninov's hand span

In 1943 the Russian virtuoso pianist, composer, and conductor Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov (1873-1943) became ill in the middle of a concert tour and was admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles. When cancer was diagnosed, he looked at his hands and whispered, ‘My dear hands... Farewell, my poor hands.’ Were his hands the key to his suffering? Rachmaninov is perhaps best known for his second, C minor, piano concerto, popularized in the films Brief Encounter (1945) and The Seven Year Itch (1955); the adagio sostenuto provided inspiration for Eric Carmen's 1976 pop song All By Myself, later covered by Celine Dion and mimed with passion by Renee Zellweger in the opening scenes of Bridget Jones's Diary in 2001. The third, D minor, piano concerto, already popular, was given further exposure by David Helfgott, as portrayed in Shine (1996). In his lifetime Rachmaninov's prelude in C sharp minor was so popular as a concert encore that he grew to hate it. And works such as the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Symphonic Dances cemented his popularity. His technical perfection was legendary. It was said that his large hands were able to span a twelfth (an octave and a half or, for example, a stretch from middle C to high G). The size of his hands may have been a manifestation of Marfan's syndrome, their size and slenderness typical of arachnodactyly.1,2 However, Rachmaninov did not clearly exhibit any of the other clinical characteristics typical of Marfan's, such as scoliosis, pectus excavatum, and eye or cardiac complications. Nor did he express any of the clinical effects of a Marfan-related syndrome, such as Beal's syndrome (congenital contractural arachnodactyly), Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, homocystinuria, Stickler syndrome, or Sphrintzen-Goldberg syndrome. There is no indication that his immediate family had similar hand spans, ruling out familial arachnodactyly. Rachmaninov did not display any signs of digital clubbing or any obvious hypertrophic skin changes associated with pachydermoperiostitis. Acromegaly is an alternative diagnosis. From photographs of Rachmaninov in the 1920s and his portrait by Konstantin Somov in 1925 (Figure 1), at a time when he was recording his four piano concerti, the coarse facial features of acromegaly are not immediately apparent. However, a case can be made from later photographs. Figure 1 Portrait of Sergei Rachmaninov (1925) by Konstantin Somov; oil on canvas. The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia Rachmaninov's repeated bouts of depression3 are also consistent with a diagnosis of acromegaly. On 27 March 1897, his First Symphony was poorly received in an under-rehearsed performance conducted by an inebriated Aleksandr Glazunov. This event, from which Rachmaninov fled in horror, is said to have triggered his first major episode of depression, which temporarily brought his composing career to a standstill: ‘all my hopes, all belief in myself, had been destroyed.’ It would not be until the latter half of 1900 that he returned to composition, with the help of a hypnotist, Dr Nikolai Dahl, to whom he dedicated his Second Piano Concerto, the second and third movements of which he brilliantly performed in December of that year. His second major bout of depression began during the Second World War, when he was living near Los Angeles, probably related to worries over the safety of one of his daughters and grief over the deaths of relatives and friends in the war. During a heavy concert schedule in Russia in 1912, he interrupted his schedule because of stiffness in his hands. This may have been due to overuse, although carpal tunnel syndrome or simply swelling and puffiness of the hands associated with acromegaly may have been the cause. In 1942, Rachmaninov made a final revision of his troublesome Fourth Concerto but composed no more new music. A rapidly progressing melanoma forced him to break off his 1942-1943 concert tour after a recital in Knoxville, Tennessee. A little over five weeks later he died in the house he had bought the year before on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. Melanoma is associated with acromegaly4,5 and may have been a final clue to Rachmaninov's diagnosis. But then again, perhaps he just had big hands.

Representation of character in translation : Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones's Diary"

Helen Fielding’s heroine, Bridget Jones, has proven to be among the most memorable female characters in recent English fiction. According to Amina Elbendary, “in her character Bridget Helen Fielding has created a startling parody of the life of a single woman, in this case one living in a big Western city, at the end of the twentieth century.” To a large extent, Elbendary holds, the book’s success is conditioned by the fact that many readers take delight in the impression of “how true to life Bridget sounds, and how true the [novel rings]” (Elbendary). Recreating the enduring attraction of the sound and ring of the original, without any doubt, is the goal of the translator. In Walter Benjamin’s often quoted phrase, “The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (Benjamin 1973: 76).

No Tale, No Sale: A Novel Approach to Marketing Communication

Humankind is a storytelling animal. Everyone loves good stories, well told. Telling tales is central to communicating successfully with customers, yet marketing academics seem to have forgotten this fact. The stories we tell, in our papers, books and learned journals, are often less than compelling. This article contends that our principal constituents – practising managers and would-be managers – deserve better. It argues that marketing academia can improve its storytelling skills by studying bestselling novels. Two marketing-saturated bestsellers, Bridget Jones's Diary and Fight Club, are examined in detail and their salient storytelling lessons are extracted

Diary of a Los Angeles Jew, 1942-1972 (An Excerpt)

Diary of a Los Angeles Jew, 1942-1972 (An Excerpt) Marc Lee Raphael (bio) Autobiography is rather fashionable. . . . Everyone is writing his or her "memoir". . . . They are rather repulsive. —A. S Byatt Autobiography, of course, is the highest form of fiction. —E. A. J. Honigman Three different interests came together to convince me to start an autobiography, a book that is a somewhat unusual combination of diary excerpts from the first thirty years of my life and my reflections on these during the seventh decade of my life. The interests unfolded independently, but at a certain point it seemed convenient to link them into a single book. The first was a fascination with Jewish autobiography (autobiographical novels, memoirs, and autobiographies have become common around the world), initially because of a course I was preparing to teach. At the same time, I became increasingly convinced that I should take a fresh look at American Jewish life in the roughly twenty-five years after World War II. Historians of the American Jewish experience are rethinking the 1950s and 1960s, and I wanted to join the effort. And finally, a model for my book came to me when I read an unforgettable memoir, one that I have begun to use in my course on the Holocaust, Rosetta Loy's First Words. Loy's combination of diary entries in Rome on the eve of and during World War II, and her reflections on those entries (with the benefit of research in the Vatican Archives) many years later, excited me, and I am using this technique in my book. This technique has a fundamental premise underlying it, the feeling that an autobiography is only memory's report—years later—of what was once thought or felt; it is only remembered consciousness. Unlike the diary form in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel,which opens with a long list of New Year's resolutions ("I Will Not" and "I Will") and is full of plans, I hardly ever plotted my future in my diary. Perhaps this reveals the truth of what my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Veazey, told my parents ("very little imagination"), and what my sixth-grade teacher, the beloved Miss Morrison, virtually repeated two [End Page 299] years later ("not too. . . imaginative"). I hope that the use of my diary excerpts, combined with much later commentary on these entries, prevents me from substituting the completely formed from that which was only in the process of being formed, from attributing a logical coherence or single meaning to events that were open at the time, from presenting a teleology, a movement toward a specific goal, when at the time I had not a clue where I was heading. Even worse would be to recall something that I never was at all. Of course, there is no certainty about the "self," the autos, and perhaps the entire effort to turn a bios,a life, into a text, is problematic. I don't think so. So this is both a history of a Los Angeles Jew in the middle of the last century, and a history of my reading of that history. It is a narrative of self, for Oliver Sacks is correct, I think, when he notes that "it might be said that each of us constructs and lives a 'narrative,' and that this narrative is us, our identities."1 This is the story of one self, and how this self related to Los Angeles, to family, to friends, and especially to Judaism. Of course, the "self" is a construction, a persona that must (to some extent) be carefully protected and maintained, but I hope this format does not conceal every weakness and magnify every strength. David Ellenson (b. 1947) noted in an autobiographical essay that, for him, the "study of Judaism had become, and remains, a religious quest, an attempt at self-knowledge and discovery." For me, as well, my increasing interest in Judaism and Jewish texts has been a religious quest, and I note this as early as in sermons I delivered as a teen. And I never doubted that the person I recall when I read my diary and remember the...

Contextualizing Bridget Jones

Helen Fielding has been praised for the authentic narrative voice in Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, but critics argue that the novels are anti-feminist because of Bridget's failure to remake herself and to control her life and her narrative. This argument rests on questionable premises: that the self can be remade, and that control is achievable. Bridget interrogates these assumptions, which she identifies as particularly American, recalls Jane Austen, who treats self-improvement ironically, and ultimately rejects the American dream of a perfected self and embraces the Blair-era British communitarianism that facilitates her success and the success of her narrative. Bridget's voice is authentic because it insists that the experience of being out of control and being forced into mutually dependent relationships is unavoidable. Fielding's preoccupation with these issues is echoed in the work of contemporary British novelists A. S. Byatt and Anita Brookner.