Epistolary Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Letters are venerable performative media. As literary enactments they affect the writers themselves, who (as M. M. Bakhtin observed) are “unconsummated… axiologically yet to be.” They are becoming subjects in the process of self-making. As for their collective effects: Reaching out to others, they participate in forging textually-inspired communities of sense. Ranging from revolutionary zealotry, seeking to inspire oppositional sects, through practices of critique that question all forms of collective coherence, to ethical universalism aimed at overall communal ethico-political accord, the epistle has led varying political lives. The papers on this panel pick up part of that variation, as they reflect the above-noted range of textual engagement. The protagonists in the papers, hailing from varying historical epochs, include the anarchist printers, Georgia Replogle and Benjamin Tucker, the apostle Saint Paul, the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the black activist Malcolm X, and the philosophical/literary thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Robert Musil.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• From Homo Natura to Homo Historia: Nietzsche and Musil on Writing - Brook Blair, University of Northern Colorado

• Printers’ Letters: Epistolary and Compositional Exchanges - Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawaii, Manoa

• Apocalypsis : Letters, Diplomacies, and Becoming Malcolm X - Sam Opondo, Vassar College

• The Politics of Zealotry: St Paul and Pier Paolo Pasolini - Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Chair

• Lida E. Maxwell Boston University

Discussant

• Elizabeth R. Wingrove University of Michigan, Ann Arbor