21 Oct What is a Letter?
Peter Stallybrass (English, University of Pennsylvania)
Friday, October 21 / 3:30 PM
South Hall 2635
From the late nineteenth century on, there has been a chorus of complaints about the decline of letter-writing as it lost out first to postcards and, finally, to email. This talk will try to show that for the great majority of letter-writers, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the art of letter-writing has been the art of creating as much blank space as possible so as to write as little as possible.
Professor Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library (2011-12).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Material Texts RFG.