January 2024
Epistolary Becomings: Archival Traces and Diffractive Readings
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2024. 'Epistolary Becomings', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/january-2024
In January 2024 I was invited to give a plenary lecture for the International Methodological Seminar on ‘Heritage of ordinary letters: research goals and methodologies’, organised by the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore’. My talk focused on on epistemological and methodological issues in analysing women mathematicians' letters. In doing so I used the lens of what I have configured in my work as ‘epistolary sensibility’ (Tamboukou 2020), meaning the analytical trend of engaging with letters , taking them not just as ‘a document of life’, amongst others, but paying close attention to their epistolary traits, which include amongst others, their relational and dialogic character, their ephemerality, the power dynamics of the epistolary relationship, the importance of salutations and greetings, the different time frames of writing a letter, posting it (or not), reading it and responding to it (or not), the materiality of the epistolary act, as well as the narrative extravagances of letter-writing.
An important part of my epistolary sensibility has always been the fact that all letters are always, already archival documents and in situating my subject position, I am both a researcher in the archive, as well as an external reader of them. In this context, an important aspect of my research is the experience of working in different archives and with different epistolsary documents both analogue, digital, digitized, and photographed. What is the difference then, I asked in my talk, between reading a handwritten letter in the archive, and later its image version, a digitised version of a handwritten letter in an online library or archive, a published version of handwritten letters, or a transcribed and published letter in both historical and contemporary publications? In thinking about the nuances of working with different types of epistolary documents, I have used the notion of diffraction (Haraway 1997), as a way of reading different types and forms of epistolary documents as entangled in the process of making meaning, offering different insights and forming superimposition effects, rather than creating troubled binaries such as the analogue and the digital, the original and the transcribed, or the edited and the unpublished. [Listen to my talk below for more details on how I use the lens of diffraction].
In this light, diffractive ways of reading and analysing epistolary documents are not only about how I understand the content and discourse of a letter as a static entity or meaning. It is also about how I tune into the various rhythms of meaning and understanding. In the light of wave phenomena, the meanings that are enacted through the reading and analysis of different types of epistolary documents keep creating a variety of superimposition effects, producing constructive and destructive interferences. Finally, diffraction changes not only the way I see differences in the epistolary documents by tracing their archival trails, but also how I mark and change my position vis-a-vis the letters I am studying in my attempt to understand the process of becoming a woman mathematician in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the case of women mathematicians’ letters, it is not only the differences between analogue and digitised, or published and unpublished letters that we should consider, but also that many of their letters have only been found in draft forms, that many letters have been lost, damaged or destroyed, and that even in several extant letters we have very few traces of personal feelings and thoughts. And yet, multi-modal, fragmented and discontinuous as they are and will always be, analogue, digitised, edited, translated and published letters have left traces of ‘epistolary waves’, which as they ebb and flow, create a pattern that has a meaning in understanding the process of becoming a woman mathematician in post-Enlightenment Europe.
References
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge.
Tamboukou, Maria. 2020. ‘Epistolary Lives: fragments, sensibility, assemblages in auto/biographical research’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography, edited by Anne Chapell and Julie M. Parsons, 157-164. Basingstoke: Palgrave.