Love Letters as A Medium of Romantic Bonding: Representation, Phaticity, and Transmission

• In Event: Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder! OR Does It?: Investigating Long Distance Relationships

Abstract

This paper examines love letters as a medium of romantic bonding and investigates the ways in which the symbolic and material aspects of letters contribute to lovers’ experiences. It draws on a large corpus of love letters, love letter writing guides, literary works, and popular art, where authors from various cultural and historical contexts reflected on their own letter writing experiences or comment on those of others. This paper argues that the sense of unity between letter-writing couples is facilitated and constrained by love letters as symbolic representation, phatic communication, and transmission channel. This approach to love letters as a relational medium offers a useful way to understand how the symbolic and material aspects of communication media combine to shape intimate relationships and the relational partners’ feeling of being together over distance. It also provides a useful lens to critically examine popular concepts in current studies of mediated interpersonal relationships.

Author

• Hua Su, University of Iowa