Letters and Postcards

Question 1

Letters and Postcards Primary Literature

Tom Phillips - Postcard Century

Answer 1

• Phillips is 81. Likely seen most of these postcards.
• Phillips was an artist in film, music, painting, sculpture, wire construction, stage design, furniture, literature, criticism.
• Phillips is as concerned with what is written on the cards, ‘these marvellous receptacles of memory, bearers of image and carriers of news’.
• Seaside prevalent, with sexual innuendo, race, innovation, royalty, landmarks. Piccadilly Circus appears in every decade. ‘Dilly Boys’ – male prostitutes- may be queer subtext in picking PC as a subject.

Question 2

Letters and Postcards Secondary Literature

Summarise the arguments of Celia Hughes, ‘Left Activism, Succour and Selfhood: the Epistolary Friendship of Two Revolutionary Mothers in 1970s Britain’

Answer 2

• Epistolary accounts of women in the 1970s capture class and social change of women in the liberation movement, evidenced in correspondence between Di and Annie.
• Walter Ong has discussed the role that writing provides as a space for reflection that ‘heightens consciousness’. Removed from the ‘real existential present’, the writer is a solitary creature, who is protected from the disruptive challenge of competing thoughts and feeling.
• The relationship, born through cheap postage, allowed for a friendship based on radical commitment and feminist ethics to grow.
• Letters testify to the ‘horizon of possibilities’ that intimate life stories present through letters.

Question 3

Letters and Postcards Secondary Literature

Summarise the arguments of Miriam Dobson, ‘Letters’ in Dobson and Ziemann, Reading Primary Sources

Answer 3

• Letters as troublesome genre - variety and nature of conveyance. Earlier letters were written to be read aloud.
• Cécile Dauphin contends that the letter must be understood as an ‘experimental form’ , ‘a meeting place between the social and the inner being’. Letters went from a format for ‘eminent men’ to democratised outlet. New method of constructing self. 1960s, fascination with Lenin’s letters to gain personal insight.
• Historians increasingly tempted in 20th c to use letters to explore poor and powerless, esp. Post ‘penny post’.
• Have to question why the letter was kept, what discourse it omits, what structures are effective over them. Letter in the USSR was something more political - a means to petition - ‘speaking Bolshevik’ won attention.