Curiosities!

Curiosities!

As regular readers of this blog will know, WWW work over the last few weeks has been preoccupied with two interrelated research matters. These are the current 2015/16 and still unfolding crisis in South African universities, and the riots and other protests in South African colleges in 1920, 1946 and 1955/56, and they have been written about in five previous blogs (check the list – all are labelled ‘the fire next time?’). While interesting to write and even more interesting to closely analyse the research data, they have completely absorbed time and attention. Time now to turn to other matters.

The first thing done has been to revise and re-present the Curiosities pages on the WWW website. Both the Traces and the Curiosities provide discussions of specific research data. The curiosities are traces that raise interesting and stretching questions about the nature or character, the ontology, of ‘the letter’.The curiosities discussed are sometimes whole collections, sometimes sets of letter-writers, sometimes specific pieces of writing. The accompanying photograph of the new-look Curiosities entry page gives a clue as to the changes made.

Each of the curiosities has been edited, and in a number of cases also re-titled, in order to emphasise its part in problematising ‘the letter’. In addition, they have been re-ordered, to work from the more general to the more specific examples of ontological, and through this epistemological, puzzles.

Who owns letters from the past and what are the ethical issues in using them? Are printed form letters but which have a personal signature to be viewed as letters or not? Is a handwritten copy made by the person who wrote a letter to be seen as a letter if the original no longer exists or something else? Is a false or duplicitous letter still a letter? The curiosities each raise fascinating and also important questions of this kind. But, there are likely to be other curiosities that exist and challenge the boundaries of letterness and these too should be added to this set of discussions. What doesn’t appear and should?

Please email us to say about anything else you think should be covered in the list of curiosities and we will be pleased to provide!

Last updated: 21 October 2017


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