Winter 1998
Epistolary Literature
授課教師：胡錦媛 (Hu Chinyuan)
課程簡介：
. . . Granted, then, that all of literature is a long
letter to an invisible
other, a present, a possible, or a future passion that
we rid ourselves of,
feed, or seek.
--The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters
The literary importance of letters did not end with the demise of the eighteenth-century
epistolary novel. On the contrary, in the late twentieth-century,
with the rise of feminist and poststructuralist theories, epistolary literature
has once again occupied its privileged position in contemporary literature.
Feminist theories offer epistolary discourse as a model for "radically
anti-mimetic and profoundly political" expression. According to Linda
Kauffman, epistolary "subverts . . . conventional dichotomies and explores
. . . transgressions and transformations." Jacques Lacan's seminar
on "The Purloined Letter," with the reactions it provoked, and Jacques
Derrida's The Post Card are other, more obvious manifestations of
the letter's role in theoretical struggles. Therefore, reflecting
on postmodernism, postrepresentation and feminist criticism, Kauffman announces
the ubiquity of the letter: "The post-age' . . . is upon us."
As such, our major concerns of this class will be the gender issue in
letter-writing, the nature of letter-writing, the question of whether individuals
can ever understand one another and the necessity of trying to communicate.
課程要求：
Active participation in discussions, and one final paper (no sit-down
exams).
指定教材：
Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, & Maria Velho da Costa.
The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters.
Francoise De Graffigny. Letter from a Peruvian Woman.
Choderlos De Laclos. Dangerous Liaisons.
Jacques Derrida. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond.
Gabriel-joseph de Lavergne Guilleragues. Lettres portugaises.
Thomas Hardy. "On the Western Circuit."
Samuel Richardson. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.
---. Clarissa.
Stefan Zweig. "Letters from an Unknown Woman"
參考書目：
Altman, Janet. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1982.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, tr. Richard
Howard. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989.
Castle, Terry. Clarissa*s Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption
in Richardson*s Clarissa. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1982.
Cox, Stephen D. "The Stranger Within Thee": Concepts of the
Self in Late-Eighteenth-Century Literature. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgy Press, 1980.
Duyfhuizen. Bernard. Narratives of Transmission.
Cranberry, NJ: Associated UP, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality
and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychology
of Love, ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963,
pp. 214-19.
Gillis, Christina Marsden. The Paradox of Privacy.
Gainesvillez: University Presses of Florida, 1983.
Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. Ed. Writing the Female Voice:
Essays on Epistolary Literature. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989.
Kauffman, Linda S. Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and
Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
---. Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction.
Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Kaufmann, Vincent. Post Scripts: The Writer*s Workshop.
Tr. Deborah Treisman. Cambridge & London: Harvard UP, 1994.
Muller, John P. and William J. Richardson. Eds. The
Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
Perry, Ruth. Women, Letters, and the Novel. New
York: AMS Press, Inc., 1980.
Romberg, Bertil. Studies in the Narrative Technique of the
First-Person Novel. Stockhoim: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962.
Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia,
Electric Speech. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1957.
中外文學22:11 (April, 1994) Special Issue on《中西書信體文學》(Ed.
胡錦媛)
聯合文學No. 161 (March, 1998) Special Issue on《書信文學》
Epistolary Literature 
