may be presented, read, and felt? And read and re-read? Seeing Red? How did she come to find form in the epistolary novel? What is the source of her authority? (I do not mean authority as in expert but, rather, her authorial voice.) These are just some of the questions that floated in my consciousness when I first picked up Seeing Red - A Pedagogy of Parallax - and turned its pages. These pages revealed the power and simplicity of letters written and sent (and unsent) to tell an untold story with conviction and creativity. The heart of the matter is the emotional strings that letters create.
Seeing Red reminds me of the many ways that form plays out in creative scholarship informed by the arts and envisioned by artists. Pauline uses letters to provide a structure to the work. Yet they are also the genre or medium of the piece. The letters give the work a certain appearance and there is comfort in their irregular regularity. I (and I imagine most readers) know and experience letters, even if they be more of the electronic kind than I prefer. I have a sense of what to expect of them yet they are bound to provide surprising twists and turns. As such they possess a certain aesthetic but, as I say that, I am also reminded of their potency as method. Exchanges between persons in relation have a rhythm and a cadence and a structure and vocabulary that aids in making sense of the relational world they represent. The letters were, I imagine, at first only a possibility for revealing her scholarship; but the letters unfolded as Pauline explored the relational heart of Seeing Red.