Abstracts of 250 words in length should be submitted to the ACLA official website at http://www.acla.org/submit, or as e-mail attachments to saintjacques@janvaneyck.nl

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 15, 2007

This panel, “The Arrival of Enigma: Letters,” welcomes papers from a variety of disciplines that critically investigate the deployment of correspondence and letters as tools for “reading into” literature, theory, and other bodies of work (art, religion, the law). The letter, and even the broader notion of correspondence, has thus far occupied an ambiguous location within literary and cultural analysis. On the one hand, an author’s correspondence might lure critical interpretations into the perceived security of biographical intentionality. On the other hand, poststructuralist theory has challenged such readings of intentionality in favor of probing narratological constructions of agency. This panel particularly welcomes papers that probe the variety of intertextual outcomes letters might have when they arrive at multiple destinations, as time changes the cultural viewpoint(s) of a letter’s recipients, the significance of the letter, and the ways in which letters are “read” as cultural objects and theoretical metaphors.