Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen

Abstract:Poetic diaries kept by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen, neither originally intended for publication, offer insight into an unexplored aspect of the diary as literary form: the genre's diurnality (or dailiness) as a shape governed more by seasonal and bodily cycles than by time as measured by clocks or calendars. Mullen has at times responded to Stein as a problematic modernist predecessor, but these two diaries do not engage in direct dialogue. Rather, as Stein's diary encodes the lesbian relationship at the heart of her domestic life and Mullen's diary participates in a newly recovered tradition of African American nature writing, both poets find a welcoming home for subtext in the diurnal rhythms and stylistic conventions of diary form.