American Letters

By Claude Richard

At his death in 1988, Claude Richard was one of the most active French scholars working at the confluence of American literary history and critical theory. His last writings, translated here for the first time, offer an incisive reading of American literature that finds Poe at its center and traces new lines of continuity between the works of the nineteenth century and those of contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon.

In American Letters, Richard uses the writings of such theorists as Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Serres as a means to demonstrate the essential modernity of American literature from Poe onward. His readings of Poe's detective stories, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, Thoreau's Walden, and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 focus on the transmission of various sorts of letters as signifiers in the act of communication. Whether discussing the letter as alphabetic or hieroglyphic, as natural or cultural, as transmitted within envelopes or written upon the bodies of whales or sailors, Richard insists that the question of American letters is "the question of the letter, of the text, of writing."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812234340
• ISBN13: 9780812234343
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"