Dangerous Letters
Proposed Special Session
2002 MLA Annual Convention
Opening letters has changed since Anthrax. Bioterrorism has shown how
envelopes can contain literally life-threatening messages, how mail can
disrupt national security. However, literature has long linked letters
with the treasonous and illicit. Many 19th- and 20th-century British
and American novels ask and answer: what should make me suspect a piece
of mail; what should I do with suspicious letters? The cultural,
political, and literary issues these novelistic representations of
dangerous letters address constitute this session’s subject.
Dangerous Letters, a special session I plan to propose for the 2002 MLA
Annual Convention in New York, will look at questions such as:
—what constitutes a dangerous letter? Do generic formulas for this
writing exist?
—how does the dangerous letter allow novels to explore issues of
pornography, blackmail, treason, the line between censorship and
protection, authorized and unauthorized surveillance, fact and fiction?
—how do these texts approach the writer of the dangerous letter? Does
this figure speak to authorial inhibitions or transgressions, limits set
by or on gendered, ethnic, or national voices?
—how would we write the history of the Post Office and its relationship
with and in 19th- and/or 20th-century novels?
—in what genres does the Post Office and its rhetoric of protection most
often appear and why?
These questions are not the only possible ones to consider; I encourage
a diversity of approaches. Please send 1-page abstracts and vitae by 15
March 2002 to ler556@mizzou.edu or Laura Rotunno, Department of English,
107 Tate Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211. Also feel
free to write me with any questions.
Note: All participants in convention sessions must be MLA members by 1
April 2002.
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