Abstract
“L’espèce de journal” written by Marie Du Bois (1601-1679) is usually placed in the category of “intimate writings”, but in this paper it is used to interrogate the fundamentals of this category of writing. Questioning the perspectives of transmission present in this text, this article looks at the measurement of the capacity of this kind of writing to assure the distant presence of an experience. Nevertheless, the perception of this presence involves the question of which act of reading are we capable of producing at three and a half centuries distance. The sharing of meaning as the presence of the past - the feeling of “seeing” what is being narrated - depends on the writing choices operated by the author, whose efficacy traverses time: dialogues, “romantic” narratives, autobiographic traits. Therefore, it is the relationship between testimony and literature, approached from the idea of “society in literature”, which postulates a located - or historically observable - continuity.
Keywords:
experience; testimony; literature; writing; transmission; 17th century