Modern Self Research Articles

Conradian contracts: exchange and identity in the immigrant imagination

Conradian Contracts: Exchange and Identity in the Immigrant Imagination Tamas Juhasz Lanham: Lexington, 2011. xiv + 218 pp.Themes of displacement, alienation, and feature heavily throughout the terrain of Conrad's works, and Conrad's own sense of exile as a Polish native has been well documented. In addition, many have noted that Conrad as a struggling writer experienced disappointment in low commercial sales, constantly in debt for most of his career. In Conradian Contracts: Exchange and Identity in the Immigrant Imagination, Tamas Juhasz combines these two aspects of rejection-the social and the economic-to suggest that Conrad considered economic success as an avenue towards social integration for the displaced, foreign individual, an interpretation that, Juhasz argues, manifests within Conrad's novels and short stories through varied forms of transactions, pacts, and systems that mingle the financial-commercial sphere and the personal-social sphere in an individual's problematic attempt to (re)gain a lost sense of fulfillment and unity.Relying heavily on Jacques Lacan, Juhasz considers the concept of commerce to include any relationship that encompasses sites of desire, recognition, and reciprocity, defining exchange as the substitution or replacement of one thing for another. In this way, connections between dissimilar objects (and people) can be made, connections which are also dependent on dialogue, or some type of communication, and on a metaphorical agreement of value. Juhasz believes Conrad's works display an understanding of trade and commerce as sites of desire and that his characters express a yearning to return to, in a Lacanian sense, a unified, complete self. This desire for wholeness, particularly evident in the imagination of diasporic and marginalized subjects, constitutes a narcissistic search for an ideal self that is both unattainable and illusory. According to Juhasz, the tension among the realms of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real is expressed primarily through systems of exchange: Conrad's characters avoid the Real through engagement with cultural transactions within the Symbolic order which also is incompatible with the Imaginary because transactions are purely dualistic manifestations (32). Equipped with a broad, psychoanalytic definition of commerce and reciprocity, Juhasz includes five novels (Almayer's Folly, Under Western Eyes, Secret Agent, Lord Jim, and Nostromo) and three short stories (Typhoon, The Secret Sharer, and The Duel) in his analysis. Juhasz fully outlines his interdisciplinary approach in Chapter Two, but he begins his first chapter with an analysis of Almayer's Folly in order to portray how Conrad's first novel anticipates the motif that will become dominant in Conrad's later works. Juhasz analyzes Almayer's various failed attempts to achieve social connection and recognition, including through his quasi-incestuous relationship with daughter Nina. Contesting Thomas Moser's infamous dismissal of Almayer's Folly's romance as an uncongenial subject (qtd. in Juhasz 9), Juhasz instead views the narrative romance as an integral parallel to Almayer's trading relationships, or another version of the motif that promises personal fulfillment, of easing the pain of isolation (32), to the displaced individual in much the same way trade promises economic fulfillment. However, Juhasz contends that Almayer's withdrawal and ultimate death speaks to his inability to establish a successful system of reciprocity, attributed to Almayer's failure to adjust to a nonWestern community but also represents the fractured ties of the modern self with community. only return Almayer receives is an absolute (but unprofitable) act of return to the state of non-being (20). Juhasz's in-depth analysis of Almayer's Folly sets up thematic elements such as the threat of annihilation, broken community, subversive desires, and commodity that will reappear in subsequent chapters, and prepares readers for a comprehensive study that will bring together postcolonial, gender, and psychoanalytical-linguistic criticisms. …

Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self

Misty G. Anderson. Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 296 + xii pages. $65.Misty Anderson's study of how Methodism was represented in eighteenth century, Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self, opens up her subject into broad historical narratives about gender, sexuality, relationship between Christianity and secular, and, indeed, very nature of identity itself, all without losing its grounding in dense, evidential detail drawn from a dazzling array of diverse sources. In book, close readings work dialectically with important theoretical and political concepts instead of being driven and constrained by them. While focused on answering a very specific question-not what Methodism was but how Methodism was imagined in eighteenth century-Anderson's analysis of print texts from novel to hymn, of visual representations, and of embodied performances presents new ways of thinking about just religion but also gender, sexuality, and such bedrock modern concepts as the self. This is a book with its telos in any one theoretical camp or subdivision of cultural studies, though it has its roots in many. Imagining Methodism starts with an openeyed, honest interest in figuring out what Methodism and Methodists meant to eighteenth-century British publics and individuals. In process of that investigation, Anderson contributes invaluable, field-changing insight to queer, feminist, materialist, and performance-oriented work on early modern Britain and its place in history of the modern.Of course, as introduction amply documents, Anderson's focus on Methodism is hardly random but rather places her book in midst of historical debates over social relationships between various types of Christianity and alleged secularism emergent with European Enlightenment. There is a real need for good, historical, materialist work in this area. As Anderson points out, work of Marxist cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson and Max Weber tends to subsume religion into capitalist ideology as the Protestant ethic while Marxist literary critics like Ian Watt edge it out of their readings altogether to focus on an emergent, secularly motivated middle class and its realist aesthetic. Much otherwise excellent work in literary and historical cultural studies has been limited by this implicit alignment between secularism and progressive politics. Anderson joins cultural critics who are skeptical about dominance of skepticism by taking seriously proposition that Methodism, largest new religious movement in period and at heart of modern evangelicalism, might be intrinsic to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and its active negotiation of religion in 'a secular age,' which redefines rather than destroys modern belief (6). This is to say that Anderson embraces religion over secularism as key to understanding formation of modern identities. As she puts her argument, it is not that secular and religious capture complete horizon of possibility in project of modernity, but that their opposition achieves a cultural dominance that defines era (11).The concept of self is central to Anderson's cultural analysis, a turn back to an older term and away from well-theorized, post-structuralist preference for subjectivity. Of course, Anderson has strong methodological backup in Dror Wahrman's The Making of Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England on historical formation of modern gender identities, but her choice is primarily historical; she takes her definition of term back to John Locke's conscious, thinking thing, individual consciousness. The Lockean self links this consciousness with sensation, opening itself up to feeling as well as thought. …

Let's Get Fiscal: Hollywood romance and the mechanism of the self in modernity

Let's Get Fiscal: Hollywood romance and the mechanism of the self in modernity

The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (review)

Reviewed by: The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood Matthew J. Smith (bio) Joel B. Altman. The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. x + 454. $49.00. The subject of Joel Altman’s new book is the conflation of probability and truth in Othello, which it amplifies and makes cogent through a wealth of contexts— rhetorical, philosophical, dramaturgical, and social, to name a few. Supplemented with illustrations from Shakespeare’s other plays, especially those that circumscribe the writing of Othello, The Improbability of “Othello” describes aspects of early modern subjectivity that result from the “impact of Iago on Othello,” that is, from characters’ responses to the realization that truth is comprised of mere contingency and evidence of likelihood (22). Like Altman’s earlier book, The Tudor Play of Mind (1978), which traces Elizabethan drama to the rhetorical tradition of arguing questions in utramque partem—on both sides—his new book also begins by connecting the classical and the early modern in what he calls the “rhetorical anthropology” of Shakespearean theater. Rhetorical anthropology is “an account of human behavior” that locates judgment between the tension of “ingenious” interpretation of material—extemporary, reliant on circumstance, and, importantly, subjectively “interested” in the outcome—and “apodeictic” interpretation—the demonstration of material as if it were self-evident, regardless of circumstance (21). The role of circumstance, here, is essential to Altman’s definition of the early modern self as it is dramatized in Othello. It is a self “determined by its address to the world” (20). He asserts that the play’s various fractures in evidence, judgment, race, and time are intentional and aim to tease out related fractures in early modern selfhood. Such fractures result from a subjectivity that is only ever intelligible in contact with particular circumstances. Therefore, embracing Thomas Rymer’s famous critique that the play is “fraught with improbabilities” yet rejecting the claim that it is “without salt or savour,” Altman argues that the conflation of probability and truth in Shakespearean drama is both a problem and a reality; it is a problem when its rhetorical manipulation allows Iago to incisively distort Othello’s perception [End Page 442] of the people and objects around him toward a tragic end, but it is susceptible to such sophistry precisely because knowledge on the Shakespearean stage is constituted by measuring probabilities. The book is comprised of five parts, each with multiple chapters. Part 1 searches the rhetorical background of Iago’s and Othello’s respective speech habits, the one characteristically ingenious and the other apodeictic. Altman’s account of Shakespeare’s rhetorical inheritance examines the works of Greek sophists, especially Protagoras and Plato, to show how Iago’s rhetorical handle on Othello’s situation and disposition (kairos) causes Othello to abandon questions of probability for false certitude. Othello’s error also results from the rhetorical construction of ethos. Altman describes Shakespeare as “the perceptive heir to Cicero” on account of Othello’s ill-fated preference for the constancy of his reputation and ethics over the world of probability (69). Part 2 further explores the logic that confuses likelihood and truth by describing early modern education in the dialectical tandem of invention and judgment, particularly as articulated by Agricola. This section takes up the Shakespearean phrase most central to Altman’s book—the conflation of the “apt and true”—and explains it through a logic of rhetoric, namely, Iago’s linguistic maneuvers from the possible to the factual. Part 3 can be thought of as the book’s transition from uncovering Shakespeare’s rhetorical heritage to integrating this reading with Shakespeare’s physical and social dramatic contexts. It begins with an especially elucidating chapter that introduces the Christian concept of the will into rhetorical anthropology. Through an extended comparison of the Pauline sentiment—that he wills what is good yet still does evil—with Iago’s inflections of “I am not what I am,” Altman resumes the threading together of rhetoric and ontology that he began in his discussion of ethos. He alleges that the distinctly Christian character of the play is found in this Pauline fragmentation of the self (ontologically) as it is...

Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England, ed. Ute Berns

<i>Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England</i>, ed. Ute Berns

Constructing a philosophy of chiropractic: evolving worldviews and postmodern core

Objective The purpose of this article is to explore the postmodern, postrational, and postconventional core of DD Palmer's self-sense and philosophy. Discussion DD Palmer's self and philosophy can be viewed as a reaction to the self of modernity and its challenges of a fracture between mind and body, spirit, and nature. It is argued that Palmer's solution to these vexing problems facing the modern self was to use postrational and postconventional logic to overcome the dualisms. His philosophy resonates with similar postrational approaches, most notably, the German idealist Schelling. Conclusion It is argued that Palmer was one of the first postrational individuals in America and that chiropractic was an attempt at the first postrational health profession.

Constructing a philosophy of chiropractic: evolving worldviews and modern foundation

Objective The purpose of this article is to trace the foundations of DD Palmer's sense of self and philosophy of chiropractic to its sources in modern Western philosophy as well as current metatheories about modernity. Discussion DD Palmer's sense of self was indicative of a modern self. A modern self is characterized as a self that developed after the Western Enlightenment and must come to terms with the insights of modernity such as Cartesian dualism, Spinoza's substance, Rousseau's expressivism, and Kant's critiques. It is argued that Palmer's philosophy can be viewed as part of the this tradition alongside his involvement in the 19th century American metaphysical religious culture, which was itself a response to these challenges of the modern self of modernity. Conclusion Palmer's development of chiropractic and its philosophy was a reaction to the challenges and promises of modernity.

Me, myself, and I: the rise of the modern self

Moderated by Robert Hanna (University of Colorado), historians Gerald Izenberg (Washington University, St. Louis) and Jerrold Seigel (New York University), philosopher Raymond Martin (University of Maryland and Union College), and sociologist Norbert Wiley (University of Illinois) trace the evolution of the meaning of self from antiquity to the present and consider how the self described by classical philosophers matches the reality of what we know about ourselves from human experience and research.

Youth Identity Formation: Contemporary Identity Work

AbstractThe study of youth identity and its formations today is diffuse and widely expansive, charted across a variety of disciplines, including Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Education, History, English, and Cultural Studies. This review essay is largely concerned with youth identity formation as a socially bound process as understood by sociologists. I sketch some of the thematic currents that guide contemporary sociologists’ investigations of youth identity formation as socially constituted process, and some of its exemplars. I highlight two conceptual framings of note: (a) youth identity formation as ‘project’ captured in the concept of ‘identity work’ and (b) youth identity formation as historically contingent phenomenon shaped by changes to the life course and changes in conceptions of the self in late modernity.

Captain Singleton : An Epic of Mitsein ?

The history of the novel in England is conventionally understood to go hand in hand with the rise of individualism. Ian Watt is only the most influential of critics to link the novelistic form—and above all Defoe's Robinson Crusoe—with the prioritizing of a distinctively modern self freed from social constraints and dependencies. For Watt, this radical and even excessive individualism at the origins of the novel had to be tempered by the marriage plot as exemplified by Richardson, but this paper argues that already in the Defoe canon, in Captain Singleton, it is possible to locate an alternative model, an interrogation of "Being-With" alongside the "epic of solitude" that founds the English novel. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, this piece imagines what might have unfolded had Watt taken Captain Singleton rather than Robinson Crusoe as the revolutionary precursor to the novelistic tradition.

Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. By James Hinton.

Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self. By James Hinton.

Enhancement Technologies and the Modern Self

Many people feel uneasy about enhancement technologies, yet have a hard time explaining why. This unease is often less with the technologies themselves than about the desires and aspirations that they express. I suggest here that we can diagnose the source of that unease by looking at three themes that emerge in Taylor's writings about the making of the modern self: the importance of social recognition, the ethics of authenticity, and the rise of instrumental reason.

The Politics of Transcendence

Modern politics dogmatically separates politics from religion, the state from promises of salvation. This article makes a case for the fundamentally political nature of transcendence. It argues that the changing relationships between authority and salvation depend on culturally crafted engagements of the spiritual and the temporal. In a first part, I examine four key configurations of the political in the history of the West, which can be grasped as extraordinary form of “absolute” politics. From the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, the Gregorian reform, Luther's Reformation, and the French Revolution, secular forms of territorial power are grounded in an engagement between the spiritual and the temporal. In a second part, I show how ultimate ends influenced the emergence of secular forms of power. Although they lack tangible immediate effects and appear impracticable, ultimate ends shaped meanings of secular politics. Ultimate ends have been ritualized in practices of the modern state and the modern self, making the return of religion an inherent pillar of political modernity. Finally, the politics of transcendence must go beyond the friend–enemy distinction by incorporating the potentiality of forms of nonviolent political action, where the ends are superior to the means.

Die moderne self as toneelpop in Woyzeck on the Highveld

The modern self as puppet in Woyzeck on the HighveldThis article undertakes a semiotic investigation of identifications of the self in terms of a specifically South African modernism, via an exploration of an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck”. William Kentridge’s production of “Woyzeck on the Highveld”(1992; 2009) marks at least three intersections of modernist and modernising discourses. Firstly, it uses as its principal source Georg Büchner’s protomodernist text, with its description of an individual alienated from his social context. Secondly, in making use of the puppets of the Handspring Puppet Company for its central characters, the play employs a style commensurate with modernist aesthetics, in terms of the objectification of subjectivity and the mechanisation of the subject. Thirdly, by re-contextualising Büchner’s German soldier as an African mineworker, the production deals with aspects of modernisation by examining the clash, confusion and concomitant syncretism of rural and urban cultures. The article concludes by identifying the all too human desire to be more than a puppet, more than machine, and the potential consequences of the fragmented modernist self on conceptions of identity and freedom.

Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self, by James Hinton

Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self, by James Hinton

Mobility, Space and Power: On the Multiplicities of Seeing Mobility

Mobility as a key modern phenomenon can be seen in multiple ways and this article raises the question of how mobility becomes visible and real through diverse ways of seeing mobility. Mobility’s different aspects appear and take place in particular spatial settings under the workings of diverse forms of power, and recognizing this informs us about the making of spatialised mobility. It is shown how mobility intermingles with perceptions, experiences and desires of the modern self. Such workings of power relate, among other things, to framing and imagining, practising and experiencing mobility. Capturing ways of seeing mobility thus widens our language for engaging with questions of mobility and its political and social reality and possible futures.

Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (eds), Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xiii + 298, £55.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-230-23313-3.

Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (eds), Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xiii + 298, £55.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-230-23313-3. - Volume 55 Issue 2

Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (review)

Reviewed by: Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy Anna Schur (bio) Donna Tussing Orwin . Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. Stanford University Press. 2007. 256. US$55.00 Donna Tussing Orwin's fine examination of nineteenth-century Russian psychological prose begins with a discussion of its preconditions and peculiarities. Orwin argues that the models of identity emphasizing autonomy and individualism essential for the emergence of psychological realism were imported, via philosophy and literature, from the West. Striving to reproduce, in their own lives, the behaviour of the characters they admired, educated Russians were at the same time conscious of the fact that they were imitating foreign models. And it was this self-consciousness of the Russian modern self that gave Russian psychological prose its distinctive shape and theme. In a series of insightful readings, Orwin traces how Russian literature from Karamzin to Tolstoy was growing increasingly critical of the 'bookish' character of denaturalized Russian identity wrought by imitation of Western characters and ideas. Another characteristic of Russian psychological realism stressed by Orwin is what she sees as an unusually high respect for subjectivity. Focusing above all on the early writings of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Orwin masterfully examines their different strategies for representing subjectivity without 'demeaning it.' Turgenev shows respect for subjectivity by never describing it 'in detail or precisely.' Dostoevsky does not explain his characters but, rather, allows them 'to explain themselves.' And even Tolstoy, who unlike Dostoevsky often flaunts his authorial presence, still gives his characters, including morally problematic characters like Stiva Oblonsky, 'the freedom to speak [their] mind and to defend [themselves].' All three authors value the individual, the particular, the subjective over the general, the abstract, the theoretical. All three assert the ultimate unknowability of other people's internal worlds and allow the subject to retain its [End Page 359] 'original 'subjective' appearance and complexity.' And all three point to the yearning for wholeness and completion typical of the self-conscious Russian self. It is not always clear, however, what Orwin means by subjectivity. Initially, she defines subjectivity as 'the inner life and perspective of each individual.' Soon afterwards she restricts subjectivity to 'the emotional, pre-rational material' that she opposes to reason and analysis. Sometimes, subjectivity seems to be associated with self-consciousness; other times with spontaneity. Subjectivity means one thing when Dostoevsky is described as 'the most subjective of the Russian psychological realists' because he most insists on the uniqueness of the individual personality. And it means something else when Dostoevsky is said to be 'especially careful to cleanse his works of subjectivity, and to put as great a distance as he could between himself as a story teller and his finished product.' Besides theoretical clarity with regard to subjectivity, one may also occasionally wish for a fuller substantiation for some of Orwin's opinions. The reader of Flaubert, for example, may puzzle over Orwin's assertion that Tolstoy shows 'greater respect' for Anna's subjectivity than Flaubert does for Emma's. And the reader of, say, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy may ask for evidence to support the related broader claim that European psychological prose 'tended to be more reductive' than Russian prose. Other assertions might have been strengthened by engaging opposing arguments. Orwin's choice of Dostoevsky's Gorianchikov as an example of introspection and 'reflection' is a case in point. As Orwin explains, the word reflection in the special Russian sense she uses it means excessive self-consciousness. But it is precisely Gorianchikov's ability to analyze and to know himself that has been compellingly questioned by a number of critics. And although Orwin cites one of them in her footnotes, her decision not to address the challenge these opposing arguments present is regrettable, for it adversely affects her own reading. In spite of these problems Orwin's study is a must-read for anybody interested in nineteenth-century Russian literature and in literary representations of consciousness more broadly. Orwin's original readings of literary texts and her illuminating examination of their intellectual contexts have much to offer to specialists and non-specialists alike. But Orwin's most impressive contribution lies in tracing the complicated interactions between Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy...

Modernism’s Two Versions of Selfhood

I Do I Undo I Redo: Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf by Finn Fordham Oxford University Press. 2010. 281 pages It has become a commonplace of literary history, and part of a by-now commonsensical understanding of modernist novel, to refer to fluidity and instability of modern character, in sense of twentieth-century representations of personhood. With disintegration of moral and biographical integrity of discrete human form which subtended novel throughout nineteenth century--a disintegration wrought by work of figures as diverse as Darwin, Marx, Flaubert, Nietzsche, William James, and Freud, and whose story is so well known as to need no recapitulation here--it is beyond doubt that a different conception of character informs modernist novel. Whether we look at disembodied and interpenetrating voices comprising Waves, or dislocated and unknowable depths intimated in Heart of Darkness, we find a widespread skepticism directed toward self. Terms such as flux, process, absence, and indeterminacy come to replace stability, essence, presence, and epistemological certainty which formed, for instance, assumptions upon which an essentially Victorian project such as Dictionary of National Biography was founded in 1881. However, if this has come to be standard story of modernist representation of personhood, then story of modernist expression of personhood is, curiously, exact opposite. While modernist character undergoes a process of dissolution, modernist writer, according to another supposed commonplace of literary history, grows wholly rooted in a position of unique self-presence, driven toward a ruthlessly personal expression of that self. We can see this sense of modernist authorial self-hood instantiated in sites ranging from T. S. Eliot's notion of the talent to Wyndham Lewis's fiercely self-fashioning politics, from Edmund Wilson's characterization of era as a renewal of Romantic self-assertion to Richard Ellnmann and Charles Feidelson's 1965 defini-tion of modernist consciousness as one in which life at its most intense is personal and private, wholly individual (685). This is modernist self against which Fredric Jameson posits postniodernist of subject, writing: The great rnodernisnis were ... predicated on invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to conception of a unique self and private identity, a Unmquc personality and individuality (33). Yeet if postniodernisnl proclaims modernist self dead, it is a death modernist self has already undergone so far as its textual representations are concerned. I begin with this well-known tension within modernist conceptions of selfhood because it is a tension to which Finn Fordham is very Much attuned in his excellently researched and sensitively argued study of modernist selves, I Do I Undo I Redo. This tension is inherent even in Fordham's title, insofar as it invites an understanding of selfhood as a continuous process that can maintain within its continuum positions both of dissolution and agency; of activity and repose. Fordham himself covers this terrain in his history of critical engagement with modernist selfhood, cogently and accurately tracing not only place of self within modernist studies, but also place of modernist studies within philosophical histories of self. He traces way in which modernist self presents a kind of apotheosis of subjective inwardness, in sense that never before had writers been so preoccupied with inner life and with subjective origin of experience, while at same time it undermines self's reign as seat of knowledge, participating in decentering of subject (45) in whose intellectual climate we still largely operate. …

Zrození autobiografického subjektu. Máchův intimní deník a moderní básnické deníky ve vztahu k romantické ideji subjektivismu

My text is an attempt to apply Charles Taylor’s theory, dealing with the origins of the modern self, to Czech autobiographical literature originating in Romanticism. Taking a cue from Jean Starobinski and Philippe Lejeune’s concepts of modern autobiography, I analyse Karel Hynek Mácha’s personal diary from 1835 and try to find and emphasize its narrative and compositional aspects, which anticipate the poetics of modern poetic diaries.