Letters as Windows Into Situated Philosophy: Using the Epistolary Genre to Explore the Tensions Between the Public Self and Private Vision

• In Event: Supporting Epistemological Diversity and Widening the Struggle for Justice: New Directions in Critical Qualitative Research

Abstract

Purpose & Theoretical Perspectives
As Sonia Nieto puts it, “The power of the epistolary genre resides in precisely this: it makes a private act public and it gives others access to insights and wisdom that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. In the process, it allows readers to see the interactions between two people who have a personal connection, one of whom has agreed to let others listen in on the conversation”(in Lake, 2010, p. x1).

Significance & Methods
Academic writing is often characterized by impersonal abstraction. This has even been the case with the standard concept of a festschrift or other forms of homage to a particular scholar’s work. This paper explores the use of the power of epistolary genre to give salience to personal stories, appreciative reflections and dialogue through a case study that emerged out of a bricological collection of over 80 letters written to Maxine Greene.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

The role of the public intellectual requires a consciousness of how one conducts their life and beliefs as embodied philosophy. There will always be tensions between the way we see and know ourselves with the way that others critically or at times blindly and adoringly see us, but through the eyes, ears and mouths of the many that encounter us, our existential selves become a part of lived history. This case study confirms that in the case of Maxine Greene, her public life and her teaching and scholarship are all holistically united at the core.


References

Bakhtin, M.(1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: The University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
Denzin, N. K. and Lincoln, Y. S. (eds.) (1998). The Landscape of Qualitative Research.
Sage: London.
Lake, R. (2010). Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation
with Maxine Greene. New York. Teachers College Press.
Moffett, J. (1968). Teaching the universe of discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Author

• Robert Lewis Lake, Georgia Southern University