Description
Book SynopsisA reading of Van Gogh’s collected correspondence by way of aset of ideas about dialogue and self-fashioning derived especially fromMikhail Bakhtin. Patrick Grant’s central claim is that VanGogh’s letters raise from within themselves questions and issuesto which they also respond dialogically, thereby thematizing theprocess of self-fashioning within their own discourse. The manner inwhich they do so is a marker of the specifically literary dimension ofVan Gogh’s writing. Complementing Grant’s earlier criticalanalysis, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study(AU Press, 2014), this study brings Van Gogh’s collectedcorrespondence fully into the domain of modern literary studies, bothcritical and theoretical—as is long overdue.
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: The Dialogical Structure of Self-Fashioning
1 The Painterly Writer
2 Binaries, Contradictions, and “Arguments on BothSides”
3 Reading Van Gogh’s Letter-Sketches
4 Imagination and the Limits of Self-Fashioning
Conclusion: Envoi
Notes; Index
