Contenu du sommaire : Lettres d'Amérique

This study of William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation points to the relation between the process of historical writing and the shaping of a prospective memory of the founding of the Plymouth colony. Bradford's writing dictates what is to be remembered, while putting the founding moments under a providential light. As one of the most iconic texts from the colonial period, Bradford's History has strongly contributed to the representations of the “Pilgrim Fathers”, not only through retrospective readings but also through its author's shaping of a prospective memory.

This study offers to read the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle as a series of self-portraits where Emerson appears alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, under the guise of the friend, the literary agent, the vanishing self, and the author. Using the concept of “iconography,” it argues that Emerson reinvests the traditional characteristics of epistolary writing (such as fragmentation, incompletion, and dynamics), in order to compose a self-portrait in motion and to create a paradoxical, as well as ever incomplete, image of himself in which each trait belies another.

Letters are not to be trusted in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's stories. They are late, eternally deferred, and, when, or if, at long last they finally reach their destination, they are seldom true to their words—as if fin-de-siècle New England had lost its faith in correspondence. With only expectations to live on, Freeman's women characters spend their lives waiting for a letter that never comes, or keep receiving letters that fail to correspond either to themselves or to their supposed author. Nonetheless, Freeman's Fidelias, Sallys and Eglantinas abide, filling the blank left by the lover's departure, or mere absence, with their faithful endurance, spinning the yarn of their lives in spite of, or maybe because of, the breach of contract, or the lack of correspondence. This paper explores the gaping temporality which allows female characters to speculate on the interval granted by the letter's “non-coming,” or the lack of coincidence between the letter and the body with which it corresponds. Capitalizing on the missing, deferred or inadequate letter, they make the most of the delay and embroider absence into a fiction of their own.

The congressional debates on abolishing the franking privilege in 1872-1874 open a window into the institutional arrangement and administrative practices of the U.S. federal State in the 19th century. Through the use of the frank, Congressmen acquired a privileged position as intermediaries between the Executive branch and the citizens of their districts. Thus, they performed a key administrative task. This finding is far from today's common conception of the State, and prompts us to reevaluate our understanding of the forms and practices of the federal State during its first century.

Rick Bass has devoted four books to the Yaak Valley (Montana) where he has lived for twenty years. The Yaak Books all serve the same purpose: to increase readers' sensitivity to environmental destruction in the Yaak and in the remaining roadless areas of America. These precious places need to be saved, the texts all proclaim. Various strategies are used to raise the readers' awareness and urge them to react. Bass's ecoprose celebrates, fulminates, exhorts, mourns… Advocacy is at times concealed behind the seductive veils of fiction or creative nonfiction, or surfaces in more direct forms of address. This study contends that Bass's textuality has much in common with the nature, function, and art of letter writing. The Yaak Books borrow from the epistolary genre and resort to some of its rhetorical strategies: they are epistles of a kind.

Hovering between biographical precision and lyrical elaboration, Frank O'Hara's poems are often addressed to friends and lovers. As the mock manifesto “Personism” reveals, the issue of communication lies at the heart of his poetics : instead of picking up the telephone, the poet, O'Hara says, can write a poem to the person he wanted to call. Instead of writing letters, O'Hara wrote a number of epistolary poems to his would-be addressees. Feeding on aborted telephone calls and unwritten letters, O'Hara's lyricism explores a new mode of communication, which he deemed more “personal”. His poems create the illusion of an ongoing conversation between friends and lovers, while really aspiring to “the ideal possibility of not communicating” (Kaufmann). Perverting the impulse to communicate even as it claims to be nourished by it, Frank O'Hara's poetry calls for the dispersion of the author's voice by invoking the reader, who eavesdrops on every exchange, yet whose intervention is necessary to the poem's survival. O'Hara's messages never seem to reach their addressees without giving them the reassuring or disheartening impression that they are not alone in receiving them.

This paper aims at showing that the alphabetical constraint upon which Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa is built can be read as much more than a mere formal game. Letters are the central characters of this novel, thus always reminding the reader of the fabric writing is made of, while showing the power of language, whose infinite possibilities are stimulated more than hindered by the order of the alphabet. The reader is caught in a maze of forking stories that keep meaning at bay, mapping out language, the better to explore its endless territory.

The string of decisions by the U.
S. Supreme Court from 1995 to 2001 invalidating legislations widely thought to be constitutional represented the major doctrinal innovations during the ChiefJusticeship of William Rehnquist. However ambiguous their holdings and uncertain their impact, these decisions have reactivated judicial suspicion towards Congress, and led many Court observers to wonder where they would lead the High Court if recurrent majorities were to take those precedents to their logical conclusions. By reassessing those decisions through the prism of their judicial methodology, it is possible to shed a new light on them and to better evaluate their short term impact as well as their long term consequences regarding the conservative project of constitutional transformation.