(no subject): The Queer Contingency of Correspondent Being.
McDaniel, Sarah A.
2015
- Correspondence, a relation of mutual response, is a queer affair. Because response only occurs in the future, correspondence is predicated upon and invested in a future that is continuously and indefinitely deferred. To be a correspondent -- to be co-respondent -- is, I argue, to occupy a contingent and queer position: once one has entered into a correspondence, one has entered into a state of ind... read moreefinite wait, always anticipating a letter that may never come. This thesis seeks to agitate perceptions, readings, and understandings of correspondence by insisting upon its queerness and incoherence. On the one hand, I explore epistolary correspondence as something more (or something other) than a set of pure biographical data or a coherent narrative. On the other, I explore correspondent relationality as theoretical praxis or reading practice -- in applying it to texts not specifically epistolary in form as a way of examining the relation of queerness and contingency to text and reading more generally. Engaging two principal theoretical traditions -- queer theory and deconstructionist and post-structuralist literary theory -- I explore in each chapter a different figure for the indefinite non-definition of correspondent and literary relationality: suture (of letters, literature, or identity), 'the fold' (of the letter, of a societal margin, of/as 'queer community'), and the ever-receding line of the horizon.read less
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