Abstract
This paper concerns the character of argumentation in inner dialogue, i.e. dialogue that an individual keeps to herself in her own mind. The problem of inner dialogue research is the methodological difficulty connected with its externalization. In the text, the activity of crisis diary-writing is suggested as a way of naturally externalizing inner decision-making. By adopting a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation, the text attempts to characterize crisis diary-writing as an argumentative activity type. The argumentative characterization of crisis diary-writing involves identifying the institutional point and implemented genre as well as distinguishing the empirical counterparts of the four stages of critical discussion. For illustration, the paper draws its examples from Anne Frank’s Diary. As a result of the characterization achieved in the paper, it is concluded that crisis diary-writing is a conventionalized deliberative activity type preconditioned by implicit norms governing the conduct of argumentation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I follow up here with Greco Morasso’s suggestion that in-depth biographical interviews (externalization method she used to obtain inner dialogue data) still need to be “thoroughly described in terms of an activity type, also highlighting its difference from public communication and its relation to inner dialogue” (Greco Morasso 2013: 76). I consider various types of externalization methods (those they are managed by researcher, such as in-depth reconstructive interview or think-aloud protocol, as well as natural ones, such as unsolicited diary-writing, etc.) to be specifically conventionalized communicative practices. Their conventionalization impacts the form of argumentation that may occur in it. These practices are conventionalized in various ways depending on their exigencies, which are largely determined by the research or another aim of the given method.
Such a comparison may be addressed in future research. In this study, I am only concerned with argumentative characterization diary-writing activity.
Sociolinguistic research shows that diaries are, in comparison with other kinds of written expressions, very close to authentic speech, similar to, for example, letters. Schneider (2002: 70–81) places diaries with regard to the relationship between a speech event and its written form among the so-called imagined texts, which are characterized by the fact that the time distance between a speech event and its record is immediate, the speech event is unique and hypothetical, and the speaker and the writer are identical: “A writer records potential, conceived utterances by himself, for lack of the presence of the addressee, need to be written down rather than said; but remains in a near-speech mode. Clearly, the boundary to genuine writing is fuzzy here, but prototypically this state of affairs characterizes writers with limited proficiency and practice in writing, who simply need to put their thoughts onto paper for some reason” (Schneider 2002: 72). Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) distinguish between the language medium (i.e. phonic or graphic) and spoken and written conception, and determine the position of the text on the conceptual continuum between the poles of communication immediacy (orality, informality, unplannedness) and distance (literateness, formality, plannedness). The diaries are clearly closer to the language of immediacy because they are “material as close to actual speech as possible, only in written form.” (Sević 1999: 340, cf. van der Wal and Rutten 2013: 2; Elspaß 2007: 5, 2012: 157–159).
Zittoun and Gillespie even connect impulse to diary-writing with term of rupture which can be probably understood as alternative label for concept of crisis: They suggest to consider three cues to identify a reflection of rupture (or crisis) in diary: (1) the diarist explicitly refers to a disturbing event and signals it as such, (2) the flux of writing seems interrupted: there is a significant change in the mode, rhythm, and amount of writing, (3) the diarist’s perspectives are extremely volatile: we can observe dialogical knots (cf. Zittoun and Gillespie 2012: 16–18).
However, in general diarist’s need of diary-writing does not have to disappear. The diarist may begin to deal with another crisis, or the character of her diary-writing may change, she may start to keep e.g. “all-purpose” diary, etc.
Van Eemeren’s rather broad use of the concept of institution referring “to all socially and culturally established macro-contexts, irrespective of whether they are part of the personal, the technical or the public sphere, in which certain (formally or informally) conventionalized communicative practices have developed (…)” (van Eemeren 2010: 129, n. 1) generally does not exclude such a step.
Anne Frank kept her diary from June 2, 1942 to August 1, 1944 during time of the Holocaust when she and her family hid in a so-called Secret Annex—a hidden part of a house in Amsterdam. It is a very intimate document recording everyday life in the Annex, shaped by the constant fear of being discovered, spatial incarceration or dependence on helpers. An adolescent girl Anne reports on her perception of war, conflicts with her family and her emotional alienation from family members, her own psychological and physical maturity and about her growing romantic feelings to Peter van Pels (named as Peter van Daan in the diary). The parts of the diary in which Anne records and reflects on her conflicts with her mother and her romantic interest in Peter and considers her behaviour towards them can be identified as cases of inner decision-making. These parts will be used for illustration and case analysis. The case study is based on theoretical prominence, that is, the fact that the given subject has already been given attention by theoreticians (cf. Gerring 2007: 150). Anne Frank’s diary can be conceived as a prototypical specimen of the diary genre that has been already approached from many theoretical perspectives—literary, historical, psychological, gender etc. (cf. Enzer and Solotaroff-Enzer 2000; Alagna 2001; Lejeune 2009: 237–266; Brenner 2010; O’Donnell 2011; Haviland and Kramer 1991; Pabel 2016; Rudin 2018 etc.). The analysis from the perspective of theory argumentation can therefore be also seen as contributing to the more complex understanding this particular piece of work.
However, it is conceivable that the diarist experiences more (unrelated) unstable conditions seeking change simultaneously, or that the first crisis leads to (related) inner conflicts. In such a case, the difference is multiplied.
For the sake of clarity, the statements related to individual I-positions are distinguished graphically: underlined or in italics (cf. Aveling et al. 2014).
Kitty is a character taken from Joop ter Heul series of novels for teenage girls written by Cissy van Marxveldt. In these novels, Kitty is cheerful and humorous naughty and cheeky girl. Anne had started reading the novels before going into hiding and finished the whole series in the Secret Annex. Some of the Joop ter Heul books were written in the form of letters, which probably may have inspired Anne to use the letter format also for her diary (cf. Anne Frank House 2020a).
We can also consider that the diarist may have the aim to “call for help”. Then, showing the diary to an outside addressee would have a persuasive function, the diarist may intend to get the audience to help the diarist solve the crisis. This type of audience may be addressed in future research. However, for purposes of current study, I focus mainly on the primary audience.
In the case of Anne Frank’s diary, we can detect that Anne could have such an audience in mind because she considered the possibility of publishing her diary after the war. However, this audience does not have the same significance during her diary-writing process. Her first diary version, the so-called “manuscript” probably did not mention being shown to an outer reader and she might conceive only her own future reading. However, Anne started to think seriously about the diary’s future publication between March and May 1944. These considerations led her to start rewriting her diary into a new version after May 20, 1944 (for an overview see Lejeune 2009: 237–266). As researchers point out, for the new version, corrections, elaborations and self-censorship is characteristic, e.g. Anne left out her notes about her love for Peter and some vicious remarks about her mother (cf. Anne Frank House 2020b). For the purpose of this paper, however, I work with the “manuscript version”.
The general scheme of pragmatic argumentation is as follows: 1 Action X should be carried out. 1.1 Action X will lead to positive result Y. 1.1′ Actions of type X [such as X] that lead to positive results of type Y [such as Y] must be carried out (van Eemeren 2016: 17).
The standpoint is formulated as questions directed to Kitty (“Do you think it’s my duty to tell Father what I’m up to? Do you think our secret should be shared with a third person?”). However, since Kitty is obviously not the addressee able to answer them and give advice to Anne from her perspective, it leads me to interpret this as a provisional standpoint we can attribute to Anne’s internal I-position. Addressing Kitty can be conceived as an opportunity to externalize Anne’s inner stream of thought and as instrumental to realize and record the dialogue with the primary audience.
The general scheme of argument evaluation could be formulated as follows: 1 Action X should be carried out. 1.1 Action X is desirable. 1.1′ Actions of type X [such as X] that are generally desirable must be carried out. (cf. Wagemans 2016: 9).
References
Accardo, C.M., D.C. Aboyoun, B.A. Alford, and J.T. Cannon. 1996. Diaries: Who keeps them and why. Perceptual and Motor Skills 82 (2): 559–562.
Alagna, Magdalena. 2001. Anne Frank: Young Voice of the Holocaust. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group.
Alaszewski, Andy. 2006. Diaries as a source of suffering narratives: a critical commentary. Health, Risk & Society 8 (1): 43–58.
Alderson-Day, Ben, and Charles Fernyhough. 2015. Inner speech: development, cognitive functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin 141 (5): 931–965.
Anne Frank, House. 2020a. So, who is ‘Dear Kitty’? Available at https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/so-who-is-dear-kitty/. Accessed 14 Feb 2020.
Anne Frank, House. 2020b. The complete works of Anne Frank. Available at https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/. Accessed 14 Feb 2020.
Aveling, Emma-Louise, Alex Gillespie, and Flora Cornish. 2014. A qualitative method for analysing multivoicedness. Qualitative Research 15 (6): 670–687.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 2006 [1935]. The dialogic imagination: four essays, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Baumtrog, Michael D. 2018. Reasoning and arguing, dialectically and dialogically, among individual and multiple participants. Argumentation 32 (1): 77–98.
Ben-Amos, Batsheva. 2019. The dialogical dimension in the diary of Chaim Kaplan: 1935–1942. European Journal of Jewish Studies 1.aop: 1–36.
Billig, Michael. 1996. Arguing and thinking: a rhetorical approach to social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bolger, Niall, Angelina Davis, and Eshkol Rafaeli. 2003. Diary methods: capturing life as it is lived. Annual Review of Psychology 54 (1): 579–616.
Brenner, Rachel F. 2010. Writing as resistance: four women confronting the holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Crowther, Barbara. 1999. Writing as performance: young girls’ diaries. In Making meaning of narratives, ed. Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich, 197–221. Sage.
Culley, Margo. 1985. A day at a time: the diary literature of American women from 1764 to the present. The Feminist Press at CUNY.
Dascal, Marcelo. 2005. Debating with myself and debating with others. In Controversies and subjectivity, ed. Pierluigi Barrotta and Marcelo Dascal, 31–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V.
Didier, Beatrice. 1976. Le journal intime. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Elspaß, Stephan. 2012. The use of private letters and diaries in sociolinguistic investigation. In The handbook of historical sociolinguistics, ed. Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, 156–169. Wiley-Blacwell.
Elspaß, Stephan. 2007. A twofold view ‘from below’: new perspectives on language histories and language historiographies. In Germanic language histories ‘from below’ (1700–2000), ed. Stephan Elpaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth, and Wim Vandenbussche, 3–9. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Enzer, Hyman A., and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer (eds.). 2000. Anne Frank: reflections on her life and legacy. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Fernyhough, Charles. 2004. Alien voices and inner dialogue: towards a developmental account of auditory verbal hallucinations. New Ideas in Psychology 22 (1): 49–68.
Fothergill, Robert A. 1995. One day at a time: the diary as lifewriting. A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 10 (1): 81–91.
Frank, Otto, and Mirjam Pressler (eds.). 2001. Anne Frank: the diary of a young girl. The definitive edition. New York: Anchor Books.
Fuchs, Miriam. 2004. The text is myself: women’s life writing and catastrophe. University of Wisconsin Press.
Gass, William H. 1994. The art of self: autobiography in an age of Narcissism. Harper’s Magazine (May): 43–52. Available at https://harpers.org/blog/2017/12/the-art-of-self/. Accessed 8 Oct 2019.
Geheran, Michael J. 2011. “I am fighting the hardest battle for my Germanness now”: internal dialogues of Victor Klemperer. Psychology & Society 4 (2): 21–39.
Gerring, John. 2007. Case study research: principles and practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gillespie, Alex, Flora Cornish, Emma-Louise Aveling, and Tania Zittoun. 2008. Conflicting community commitments: a dialogical analysis of a British woman’s world war II diaries. Journal of Community Psychology 36 (1): 35–52.
Greco, Sara. 2017. Using argumentative tools to understand inner dialogue. Argumentation 31 (2): 331–358.
Greco Morasso, Sara. 2013. Multivoiced decisions: a study of migrants’ inner dialogue and its connection to social argumentation. Pragmatics & Cognition 21 (1): 55–80.
Haviland, Jeannette, and Deirdre A. Kramer. 1991. Affect-cognition relationships in adolescent diaries: the case of Anne Frank. Human Development 34 (3): 143–159.
Hermans, Hubert J. 2001. The dialogical self: toward a theory of a personal and cultural positioning. Culture & Psychology 7 (3): 243–281.
Hermans, Hubert J. 2003. The construction and reconstruction of a dialogical self. Journal of Constructivist Psychology 16 (2): 89–130.
Hermans, Hubert J. 2018. Society in the self. A theory of identity in democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hermans, Hubert J., Trix I. Rijks, and Harry J.G. Kempen. 1993. Imaginal dialogues in the self: theory and method. Journal of Personality 61 (2): 207–236.
Hyers, Lauri L. 2018. Diary methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (1): 15–43.
Kunt, Gergely. 2015. How do diaries begin? The narrative rites of adolescent diaries in Hungary. European Journal of Life Writing 4: 30–55.
Lejeune, Phillippe. 2009. On diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Manoa: University of Hawaii Press.
Mallon, Thomas. 1984. A book of one’s own: people and their diaries. New York: Ticknor and Fields.
Marty, Eric. 1985. L’ecriture du jour. Le journal d’André Gide. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
McFerran, Shannon, and Daniel G. Scott. 2013. The girls’ diary project: writing ourselves into being. Victoria: University of Victoria.
Nienkamp, Jean. 2009. Internal rhetorics: constituting selves in diaries and beyond. In Culture, rhetoric, and the vicissitudes of life, ed. Michael Carrithers, 18–33. Berghahn Books.
O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. 2011. “I certainly have the subjects in my mind”: the diary of Anne Frank as Bildungsroman. Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 32 (2): 49–88.
Oleś, Piotr, and Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl. 2010. Between nature and culture? Dialogicity as a basic human feature. In Studies in the psychology of language and communication, ed. Barbara Bokus, 41–51. Warsaw: MATRIX Publisher.
Pabel, Annemarie. 2016. “I want the diary to be my friend”: the imagined friend in Anne Frank’s Diary. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 36: 140–157.
Paperno, Irina. 2004. What can be done with diaries? The Russian Review 63 (4): 561–573.
Rainer, Tristine. 1980. The new diary. How to use a journal for self-guidance and expanded creativity. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Rendall, Steven. 1986. On diaries. Diacritics 16 (3): 56–65.
Rocci, Andrea. 2005. Connective predicates in monologic and dialogic argumentation. In Studies in communication sciences: argumentation in dialogic interaction, ed. Marcelo Dascal, Frans H. van Eemeren, Eddo Rigotti, Sorin Stati and Andrea Rocci, 97–118. Special Issue.
Rottenberg-Rosler, Biri, Shifra Schonmann, and Emanuel Berman. 2009. Dear diary: Catharsis and narratives of aloneness in adolescents’ diaries. Enquire 2 (1): 133–156.
Rudin, Shai. 2018. ‘Because we must not forget’: thematic reading of WWII diaries of young women and girls. Holocaust Studies 24 (2): 218–239.
Schneider, Edgar W. 2002. Investigating variation and change in written documents. In The handbook of language variation and change, ed. J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 67–96. Blackwell Publishing.
Sederberg, Kathryn. 2017. Writing through crisis: time, history, futurity in German diaries of the second world war. Biography 40 (2): 323–341.
Seiffge-Krenke, Inge. 1995. Stress, coping, and relationships. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Seiffge-Krenke, Inge. 1997. Imaginary companions in adolescence: Sign of a deficient or positive development? Journal of Adolescence 20 (2): 137–154.
Sević, Radmila B. 1999. Early collection of private documents: the missing link in the diachronic corpora. In Langue and parole in synchronic and diachronic perspective. Selected proceedings of the XXXIst annual meeting of the societas linguistica Europaea, St Andrews 1998, ed. Christopher Beedham, 337–347. Amsterdam u. a.: Pergamon.
Sinats, Petra, Daniel G. Scott, Shannon McFerran, Madelaine Hittos, Carys Cragg, Theresa Leblanc, and Daniela Brooks. 2005. Writing ourselves into being: writing as spiritual self-care for adolescent girls. Part two. International Journal of Children’s Spirituality 10 (3): 263–276.
Someren, Maarten W., Yvonne F. Barnard, and Jacobijn A.C. Sandberg. 1994. The think aloud method: a practical guide to modelling cognitive processes. London: Academic Press.
Surd-Büchele, Stefanie. 2011. On the relations between writing and thinking. Tätigkeitstheorie: E-Journal for Activity Theoretical Research in Germany 2 (5): 121–141.
Thompson, Charles P. 1982. Diary-keeping as a sex-role behaviour. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 20 (1): 11–13.
van der Wal, Marijke J., and Gijsbert Rutten. 2013. Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective. In Touching the past: studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents, ed. Marijke J. van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten, 1–18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Van Dijck, José. 2004. Composing the self: of diaries and lifelogs. The Fibreculture Journal 3. Available at http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-012-composing-the-self-of-diaries-and-lifelogs/. Accessed 8 Oct 2019.
van Eemeren, Frans H. 2010. Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse: extending the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
van Eemeren, Frans H. 2016. Identifying argumentative patterns: a vital step in the development of pragma-dialectics. Argumentation 30 (1): 1–24.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter, Houtlosser. 2005. Theoretical construction and argumentative reality: an analytic model of critical discussion and conventionalised types of argumentative activity. OSSA conference archive. Available at http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA6/papers/9. Accessed 8 Oct 2019.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst. 2004. A systematic theory of argumentation: the pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Eemeren, Frans H., and Peter Houtlosser. 2006. Strategic maneuvering: a synthetic recapitulation. Argumentation 20 (4): 381–392.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Peter Houtlosser, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2007. Argumentative indicators: a pragma-dialectical study. Dordrecht: Springer.
Vygotsky, Lev. 1987 [1934]. Thought and language, ed. Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Wagemans, Jean H.M. 2016. Constructing a periodic table of arguments. OSSA conference archive. Available at https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA11/papersandcommentaries/106. Accessed 8 Oct 2019.
Zampa, Marta. 2014. Arguing with oneself in writing for the news. In 8th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) conference. Available at http://rozenbergquarterly.com/issa-proceedings-2014-arguing-with-oneself-in-writing-for-the-news/. Accessed 8 Oct 2019.
Zampa, Marta, and Daniel Perrin. 2016. Arguing with oneself. Journal of Argumentation in Context 5 (1): 9–28.
Zittoun, Tania. 2007. Symbolic resources and responsibility in transitions. Young 15 (2): 193–211.
Zittoun, Tania. 2014. Three dimensions of dialogical movement. New Ideas in Psychology 32: 99–106.
Zittoun, Tania, and Alex Gillespie. 2012. Using diaries and self-writings as data in psychological research. In Emerging methods in psychology, ed. Emily Abbey and Seth Surgan, 1–26. New Brunswick/New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
Acknowledgements
This study is a result of the research funded by the Czech Science Foundation as the project GA ČR 19-14095S “The forms of (self-)persuasion in personal diaries”. I wish to thank Tomáš Ondráček and both anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments to earlier versions of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Svačinová, I. Pragma-Dialectical Reconstruction of Crisis Diary-Writing as a Communicative Activity Type. Argumentation 35, 237–264 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09524-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09524-0