学术讲座：Email Epistlemologies

讲者：Thomas Beebee 教授，宾州州立大学比较文学讲座教授

时间地点：2017年6月27日周二 14:00-16:00 闵行校区老行政楼512

题目：   

Email Epistlemologies

摘要：  

The replacement of corrrespondence by e-mail, messaging, and tweeting  seems to have driven the final nail in the coffin of “letterature.” Scholars debate whether the novel form is dead, but that no one writes letters any more hardly seems worth arguing about. What, then, in contradistinction to the various historical instrumentalizations, is the epistlemology, more accurately the phenomenology, of e-mail? How does it answer or evade the three simple questions that epistolary fiction has traditionally addressed: “Who are you?”; “Who is s/he?”; and “Who am I?” Can e-mail replace the letter as a form of mutual dialogic self-fashioning, or does it possess the inner contradictions that always remind us of our incapacity for such? Is the e-mail novel always a nostalgic, post-modern pastiche of the epistolary novel? Do the material conditions for the creation, transmission, reception, and archiving of e-mail effect the content in ways analogous to what we find in the epistolary novel? I will explore these questions as they arise in four different e-mail novels: Paige Baty’s E-mail trouble; Matt Beaumont’s E; Betcherman & Diamond's Daughters of Freya; and Ann Martin's Snail Mail No More, and Lauren Myracle’s l8r, g8r.