Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century For a Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

(Published biannually by the Autobiography Society, supported by the Dept of Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) Issue Editor: Margaretta Jolly

Deadline for abstracts: 1 August 2005

James Hewitt puts his love letters from Princess Diana up for auction; J.D. Salinger sues Ian Hamilton for quoting his archived letters in a literary biography; a circular e-mail petition about the oppression of Afghani women crashes its originator's university computer system; anthrax on envelopes adds to fears of terrorism; a woman accused of setting Colorado's biggest wildfire says she was burning a letter from her estranged husband; the testimonial letters of Korean "comfort women" help to get women's rights included in human rights charters; rockstar Alanis Morrisette riffs on unsent letters to former lovers; Ruth Picardie's e-mails, with her magazine column about dying of cancer, are published posthumously by her husband. Most people still write letters-though common opinion is that the art is dead and they are now rarely published as literature. Letters persist as celebrity or literary artefacts, faxes, e-mail, fantasized archival and genealogical heritages, testimony, visual communications, personal ads, and fan mail, as well as in more traditional forms of literary devices, historical resources, journalistic petitions, correspondence courses, and everyday communications. Arguably, letters like autobiography and biography have been energised by the age of information and global communication, confession and celebrity, testimony and trauma. Essays are accordingly invited that illuminate the practice and art of letter-writing in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or that consider letters-or their study-from previous eras in the light of contemporary concerns. Examples of topics that essays may engage:

Truth, confession, witnessing, and the contemporary letter

Persuasion in letters; postmodernity and rhetoric

Letters, loss, and trauma

Letters and the biography industry

E-mail, faxes, mobile phones, and the death/regeneration of letter writing

Letters, historiography, and the return of (grand) narrative

Publishing, archiving, and epistolary ethics

Letter-writing, migration and diasporic identities

Visual letters; the letter in art and media

(Virtual) genders, sexualities, epistolarities

Literacy and letter-writing outside the academy

Letter-writing, globalisation, petitioning

The history of epistolary theory, letter-metaphors in critical theory

Fragmentation, individuality, community, and the letter

Please send abstracts of 300-400 words to the Margaretta Jolly at m.jolly@exeter.ac.uk, School of English, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, Exeter, EX4 6DD

Posted by prolurkr at January 23, 2005 05:19 PM

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