Fall 2008

Professor Cristina Vatulescu

V29.0190.001

Twentieth Century Letters: Love, Immigration, and the Boundaries of Literature

What do immigrant letters reveal about immigration, and love letters about love? How do they mediate cultural difference, the relationship between self and (absent) other, private and public, the written and the oral? How do they articulate and shape experiences, such as intimacy, which are often just intimated in face-to-face encounters? What do letters teach us about the relationship between literature and its margins? For some, letters are the only attempt at using writing to represent oneself, for others they are the laboratory of literature or literature itself. In this course we will read a wide range of letters, from those dictated by illiterate immigrants to masterpieces of the epistolary genre; the correspondents will be real and fictional, famous and anonymous. We will explore the material history of letter writing, and the changes brought by various technologies, such as the train, the telegraph, the telephone, or e-mail. Topics also include the relationship between gender and what has often been considered a “feminine genre,” as well as the politics of personal writing. We will consider letters from the North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories database, the Dead Letter Office, surveillance files, as well as correspondence, fiction, and theoretical writings by Franz Kafka, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Viktor Shklovsky, Mariama Ba, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and others. Enrollment limited to 20.