Correspondences: Letter Writing, Literature, and Art

Catalog description

From love letters to letters to the editor, letters have been fundamental to recording public and private life for centuries. They also constitute part of our material culture, whose mark making transforms them into visual objects of interest. This class revisits this so-called lost art of letter writing and its role in novels, visual culture, and our daily lives. Considering the roles of privacy, surveillance, censorship, this class begins with a history of the postal service and then examines epistolary novels, postcards, mail art, and other literary and artistic responses to letter writing. Readings include: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1844), Franz Kafka, “Letter to my Father” (1919), Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe’s love letters, Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and artworks ranging from mail art by Ray Johnson and On Kawara, Fluxus postage stamps, Yves Klein’s “mail scandals,” postal works by Yayoi Kusama, Alighiero Boetti, and Eugenio Dittborn, and Moyra Davey’s series Mary, Marie, 2011 on Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters. The class will visit archives to consider correspondence between historical figures and students will be asked to reflect on letters found in the archive, write three short comparative papers, pen their own letters to the editor, and produce a final research paper or project.