Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age

Pamela Vanhaitsma

Description

Romantic letters are central to understanding same-sex romantic relationships from the past, with debates about so-called romantic friendship turning on conflicting interpretations of letters. Too often, however, these letters are treated simply as unstudied expressions of heartfelt feeling. In Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education, Pamela VanHaitsma nuances such approaches to reading letters, showing how the genre should be understood instead as a learned form of epistolary rhetoric.

Through archival study of instruction in the romantic letter genre, VanHaitsma challenges the normative scholarly focus on rhetorical education as preparing citizen subjects for civic engagement. She theorizes a new concept of rhetorical education for romantic engagement—defined as instruction in language practices for composing romantic relations—to prompt histories that account for the significant yet unrealized role that rhetorical training plays in inventing both civic and romantic life.

VanHaitsma's history of epistolary instruction in the nineteenth-century United States is grounded in examining popular manuals that taught the romantic letter genre; romantic correspondence of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, both freeborn African American women; and multigenre epistolary rhetoric by Yale student Albert Dodd. These case studies span rhetors who are diverse by gender, race, class, and educational background but who all developed creative ways of queering cultural norms and generic conventions in developing their same-sex romantic relationships. Ultimately, Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age argues that such rhetorical training shaped citizens as romantic subjects in predictably heteronormative ways and simultaneously opened up possibilities for their queer rhetorical practices.

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Semantics
• Rhetoric

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 18 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611179910
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age
S TUDIES IN R HETORIC/ C OMMUNICATION
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age
A Rhetorical Education
P AMELA V AN H AITSMA
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-990-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-991-0 (ebook)
Front cover design by Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller
To Jess Hughes Garrity
What a pleasure it [is] to me
to address you
My [Spouse]
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction: Beyond Civic Engagement
C HAPTER 1
The language of the heart : Genre Instruction in Heteronormative Relations
C HAPTER 2
To address you My Husband : Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus s Queer Epistolary Exchange
C HAPTER 3
Somehow or other, queer in the extreme : Albert Dodd s Civic Training and Genre-Queer Practices
Conclusion: Toward Queer Failure
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Series Editor s Preface
Pamela VanHaitsma s Queering Rhetorical Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education asks how the rhetorical genre of romantic letter writing was adapted in nineteenth-century America from the widespread notion that rhetoric had fundamentally to do with civic and public matters and was put to use in the composition of romantic relationships-and, in the cases at issue, in learning a rhetoric for composing queer romantic relationships. What she discovers fundamentally challenges the taken-for-granted supremacy and stability of the civic, the heteronormative, and the romantic, and of their composition through speech and writing-that is, through the learning, teaching, and practice of rhetoric.
Professor VanHaitsma s work is richly informed by extended archival research. Her exploration of nineteenth-century American letter-writing manuals is based largely on work she conducted at the University of Pittsburgh s Nietz Collection of American textbooks and reveals, in her account, how letter writers were guided in their treatment of class, race, gender, and other dimensions of social relations. She then turns to other archives for collections of romantic correspondence between same-sex letter writers. Here, she begins with the romantic correspondence of two African American women, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus. She shows how the correspondents appropriate, adapt, and defy the racial and gender conventions of letter-writing manuals and romantic poetry.
VanHaitsma then turns to the case of Albert Dodd, a graduate of Yale College with training in classical and nineteenth-century arts of civic rhetorical practice, who adapted and transgressed the rules of those arts in his own extensive romantic correspondence with both women and men. VanHaitsma s exploration ends with a historically and theoretically grounded invitation to reconceptualize the conventions and expectations of rhetorical education.
This brilliant and generous book may prompt us all to reimagine our notions of the scope, the methods, and the promise of rhetorical study.
T HOMAS W. B ENSON
Acknowledgments
Special gratitude goes to two friends and mentors, Jess Enoch and Steph Ceraso. Jess offered extensive and detailed feedback on multiple drafts of the project in its earlier stages. Her generosity as a reader, in every respect, has been an incredible gift. I am equally grateful for the model of her engagement with the ideas of others in her own scholarship. Jess is a feminist mentor extraordinaire, and this book and my career would not be possible without her guidance and example.
Steph has been my peer mentor since the earliest days our time together as graduate students. As we both looked ahead to our first year on the tenure track, we set monthly goals for working on our first book manuscripts, one month and one chapter at a time. We met every other week to check our progress, and Steph read and offered feedback on every page of the draft book manuscript. Throughout the process she has been there to listen, strategize in the face of potential roadblocks, and celebrate forward movement.
This project developed throughout my time at the University of Pittsburgh, Old Dominion University, and Penn State University. As a graduate student at Pitt, I was fortunate to find a challenging yet supportive intellectual community in which to begin the archival research that grounds this book. Along with Jess, Don Bialostosky, Jean Ferguson Carr, and Nancy Glazener all offered important feedback on the early research. I am grateful to Don for conversations about arrangement and style that continue to direct my writing. I also thank Don for encouraging words about academic life that he somehow knew to offer exactly when needed. While Jean and Nancy s contributions are numerous, I especially thank them for the benefit of their expertise in archival methods and nineteenth-century U.S. culture. Other faculty also offered useful feedback as I pursued my interests in queer studies and letter-writing manuals during coursework. Here I thank Mark Lynn Anderson, Nick Coles, and Lester Olson. I also appreciate fellow grad students who joined me for writing dates and/or enlivening discussions about everything from archival research to queer theory: Erin Anderson, Julie Beaulieu, Jean Bessette, Nathan Bryant, Jessica Isaac, Colleen Jankovich, Danielle Koupf, Peter Moe, Brie Owen, Dahliani Reynolds, and Stacey Waite. At Pitt my writing time and travel to conduct archival research were supported by an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship as well as a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences.
I began to develop the book manuscript while an assistant professor at ODU, where several people provided crucial support. Significant portions of the manuscript materialized during weekly writing dates with Liz Groeneveld, and I am grateful for her company, shared experience, and friendship. I thank Drew Lopenzina for fielding my many questions about the process of writing and publishing a book. I am especially grateful to Lindal Buchanan, who provided feedback on the book proposal as well as mentorship that facilitated my transition from dissertator to book writer. Thanks go to Dana Heller, Maura Hametz, and Elizabeth Zanoni, who each offered research and publication guidance at key junctures, as well as Sarah Spangler, who provided assistance with secondary research. For their general encouragement and collegiality as I developed the manuscript, I thank Kevin DePew, Candace Epps-Robertson, David Metzger, Kevin Moberly, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Alison Reed, Dan Richards, and Julia Romberger. My work on the project while at ODU was supported by a Summer Research Grant from the College of Arts and Letters, another Summer Research Fellowship from the University s Office of Research, and a Robin L. Hixon Fellowship from the Department of English.
I completed the book project while in my current position at Penn State, where I am again delighted to find a vibrant intellectual community. I thank Denise Solomon and the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences for welcoming and encouraging this work. Thank you to my colleagues in communication science-Jim Dillard, John Gastil, Erina MacGeorge, Jon Nussbaum, Lijiang Shen, Rachel Smith, and Tim Worley-for posing questions that help me to think about the interplay of interpersonal and political communication from new perspectives. I am also grateful to my fellow rhetoricians-Steve Browne, Anne Demo, Rosa Eberly, Jeremy Engels, Michele Kennerly, Abe Khan, Mary Stuckey, Brad Vivian, and Kirt Wilson-for their questions and comments about the project. It is a real treat to be surrounded by and learning from such outstanding scholars of rhetoric. Thank you especially to Michele for copious conversation about book production and publication processes. For other conversations that inform my thinking about rhetoric and archives, I thank my colleagues in the Center for Humanities and Information and the Department of English: Cheryl Glenn, Debbie Hawhee, Eric Hayot, and John Russell. I also thank the College of Liberal Arts and Department of Communication Arts and Sciences for the research summer salary and course release that supported my time when completing the final manuscript revisions.
Like all archival research projects, this one has relied absolutely on the work of archivists, special collections staff, and other historians. For their support as I conducted archival research, I thank William Daw, in Special Collections at the University of Pittsburgh; Richard Malley and Diana McCain, from the Connecticut Historical Society; and Stephen Ross, in Yale University Library s Manuscripts and Archives. I also thank Stephen Ross as well as Jeanann Croft Haas and Andrea Rapacz for additional assistance when I was navigating permissions and questions of public domain. For their groundbreaking research on letter-writing manuals, Addie Brown, Rebecca Primus, and Albert Dodd-as well as their encouragement of my work-I thank Jane Donawerth, Farrah Jasmine Griffin, Karen Hansen, Nan Johnson, Jonathan Katz, and Mary Anne Trasciatti. For the inspiration and model of his queer rhetorical and historical work, I am grateful to Chuck Morris.
At the University of South Carolina Press, I thank former acquisitions editor Jim Denton for his early support of the project and his selection of excellent readers. Both of the anonymous reviewers for this project provided constructive feedback that has made the book stronger. Also at USC Press