Hi all! Our next Gender, Media, and Cultural Studies Seminar will be held 3-4pm on Wednesday March 12, in the Deans Committee Room Arts G. 23, and will be presented by Jordan Lavers. Friend Requests in the Long Eighteenth Century: Simulating a Romantic Network Community in Letters by Karoline von Günderrode If email, text-messaging and social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have replaced the letter as the main modes of connecting and re-connecting with people in the digital age, then what have been the consequences for epistolarity, the letterness and textuality of our written correspondence? Can these mediascapes even be defined as epistolary, and if so, how does this impact our definition of epistolarity? These questions are central to my inquiry into the way in which the digital age has changed our understanding of the epistle. At the same time, this paper will argue that our understanding of social networking sites can be analysed in terms of epistolarity. Kylie Cardell and Jane Haggis have argued that “[a]s the world moves from the literacy of the letter to that of the email, video message and chat room, ‘letterness’ or epistolarity continues to shape and inform communicative sociality as genre, life and social relationships” (Cardell and Haggis). This presentation will address these questions through its methodology: an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the theorisation of epistolarity in both the humanities and the social sciences. I adopt a post-structuralist analysis of letters by the German Romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806). My post-structuralist reading is based on the concept of the simulacrum by Jean Baudrillard, as the reproduction of images, a representation, as a “vague likeness or semblance” (Kreps). Textually and temporally, Karoline von Günderrode re-produced and re-presented herself as a female writer in her correspondence to other literary women as well as male professors, theologians and editors, to simulate a Romantic network community. As a female writer, Günderrode crossed over the limitations of education and exclusions from an androcentric literary culture by fashioning a networked community through her letters. The epistolarium was a textual site in which Günderrode could do what she could not achieve as an isolated individual: reading extensively, writing, and being published. Jordan is a PhD Candidate in European Studies (and has been claimed by those in Gender Studies), and has drawn this presentation fromhis chapter entitled “The Epistolarity of a Social Network: Simulating a Romantic Network Community in Letters by Karoline von Günderrode,” in the forthcoming Social Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century: Clubs, Literary Salons and Textual Coteries, edited by Ileana Baird from the University of Virginia. Please come along to what promises to be an entertaining and insightful presentation that has been described as a 30 minute, facebook-pun-filled discussion on womens letter writing in the eighteenth-century. See you there!
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:04:24 +0000
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