Special Delivery

Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth century writers have mimed the epistolary modes as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In Special Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire. Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Shklovsky, Nabokov, Barthes, Derrida. She then turns to three women writers who are more preoccupied with politics than passion: Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood. By juxtaposing "women's productions" with men's "production of Woman," Kauffman dismantles the polarities between male and female, theory and fiction, high and low culture, male critical theory and feminist literary criticism. Kauffman demonstrates how all seven texts mercilessly expose the ideology of individualism and romantic love. Each presents alternate paradigms of desire (including queer desire), giving epistolary a distinctively postmodern stamp.