Alphabetizing Data, Deformance, and Desire in Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries as an act of artistic data visualization and poetic deformance, and a fragmentary feminist praxis. It adds Heti’s text to a lineage of books that reject and reframe canonized structures, and embeds Alphabetical Diaries within a history of women’s diary-writing. Heti’s diaristic impulse to document and record is contrasted with her desire to reorder with alphabetization, making space for new narratives, both in form and content. With its experimental and embodied structure, Alphabetical Diaries creates several intimate encounters between the reader and writer. This thesis examines the hope, love, and curiosity that emerge from that relationship. It turns to artistic data visualization, poetic deformance, and the New Narrative literary movement to propose that Alphabetical Diaries is an auto-archive of situated knowledge and literary relationality that reshapes the way we look at ourselves, others, and the world around us.