ENGL7516 Chap.8 Letters: Involving the You
Letters: Involving the You
The form defined by a pronoun
The ninth topic is the letter, and the craft of the form is the craft of the word you. A letter is addressed to someone, so a reader is always overhearing, and that position changes how every sentence lands.
The week's two primary readings are open letters reached through links on the course site, one written to the writer's fifteen-year-old self and one to a woman who told the writer's family to go back to China.
Three kinds of you
The second person can point at a named person, at the writer's own self or at any reader.
Each produces a different effect: intimacy and accusation, confession and distance, or instruction and complicity. The second-week reading by Junot Díaz uses you as self-address, so the narrator is both speaker and accused. A letter to a younger self adds time, holding knowledge the recipient could not have had.
An open letter to a stranger turns every reader into a witness.
The recommended reading
An excerpt from Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, included in the course materials, opens a novel written as a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. That fact makes the letter undeliverable and frees it to say what a deliverable letter could not.
Memories arrive as fragments, violent and tender ones side by side without transition, interrupted by a recurring passage about migrating butterflies and by reflections on language. A late admission of an earlier lie recasts what came before.
Why address changes what can be said
Oatley's chapter describes a mode of consciousness in which the self runs on imagined exchanges with others.
A letter makes that mode the whole form, anticipating replies, softening, and returning.
Drawing on Bakhtin, Oatley also notes that some works have several centres of consciousness, one of which is the reader's; in a letter, the reader occupies a place that was not meant for them.
For your drafts
If you write in the second person, decide exactly who the you is, what they know and why the letter is being written now.
Mixing addressees is the fastest way to lose the overheard quality the form depends on.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The letter as a form defined by its pronoun
- 02
Three targets for the second person
- 03
Self-address and the accused narrator
- 04
A letter to a younger self
- 05
The open letter and the reader as witness
- 06
An addressee who can never read the letter
- 07
Fragments set side by side without transition
- 08
Salutation, date and sign-off as choices
Worked example · free
Decide who the you is before drafting
- 2State what a letter to the grandfather could say that one to customers could not.
- 2State what a letter to the customers could do that one to the grandfather could not.
- 2Choose one addressee and write a first line suited to it.
Key terms
- Second Person
- Narration or address using you, which may point to a specific person, to the writer's own self, or to the reader.
- Epistolary Form
- Writing presented as a letter or a series of letters, so that the text is shaped by its addressee and its occasion.
- Open Letter
- A letter addressed to a particular person but published for a general audience, making readers witnesses to a private or public grievance.
- Addressee
- The person a letter is written to, whose knowledge and likely response shape what the writer explains and withholds.
- Fragmentary Structure
- Construction from separate short sections placed side by side, so that meaning arises from juxtaposition rather than connecting explanation.
Letters: Involving the You FAQ
What does involving the you mean in this course?
It refers to writing that addresses someone directly, as a letter does. The pronoun you changes the reader's position from observer to someone overhearing speech meant for another, and the week explores how that shift affects intimacy, tone and what can be said.
Is second-person narration the same as a letter?
Not quite. A letter addresses a particular recipient on a particular occasion, while second-person narration can use you for the narrator's own self or for the reader. The week's readings include both kinds, and comparing them shows how much depends on deciding who the you really is.
Why would a writer address someone who cannot read the letter?
Because an undeliverable letter licenses complete candour. No reply or consequence is possible, so the writer can accuse and forgive in the same passage, and the reader becomes the only person who will ever hear it, which gives the reading an unusual intensity.
Where are the set letters for this week?
The two primary readings are published online and linked from the week's section of the course Moodle site, and the recommended excerpt from a novel is available there as a file. Read the open letters with attention to their first and last lines, where address does most of its work.
Assessment move
Write the same short paragraph about one memory three times, addressed to a named person, to your younger self and to an unknown reader. Compare what each version explains and what it assumes. The version that assumes the most without losing the reader is usually the addressee to keep.
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