Reshaping the boundaries of the epistolary discourse

ENThis broad theme of letters and letter writing can be infinite. It is as if we were talking about, e.g., ‘the history of poetry’ or ‘the history of communication’. The epistolary discourse, in the famous words of Jacques Derrida, is ‘not a genre but all the genres, literature itself’. So are we speaking so broadly of the literature itself? In English this metaphor almost comes true: a letter is a sign of written language; a letter is a material object with text that we send and receive. But even if we were speaking of a subject that seems to be too wide, in the last few decades the interest in the epistolary discourse as a specific phenomenon has been growing vividly. On one hand, the boom in researches of the autobiographical writings may have had its influence. Secondly, the letters are usually considered as ‘a dying art’ in the era of digital communication, and possibly the feeling of loss and change urges the investigation of an apparently simple and well-known matter, that of the letters. For a lot of years in the Western studies of humanities the letters were recognized as marginal texts (of one’s biography, of one’s literary works, etc.), that is, in terms of Gérard Genette, as paratexts. With the recent reflections on the letters as a specific genre, as a specific form of speech, as a specific communication media, we now find ourselves wondering: is it possible to speak of the letters as of a whole? And if it is so, how do we speak about them? Are they a part of communication history, of literary history, of personal history? The answer is quite obvious: a part of all these histories. The conference that was organized in Lisbon in March of 2015 had a title 2nd Global Conference: Letter and Letter Writing, so it is clear that many different researches find their place under the broad definition of epistolarity.