Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh's voluminous correspondence-more than eight hundred letters-for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out to explore the question, "By what criteria do we judge Van Gogh's letters to be, specifically, literary?" Drawing, especially, on Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of self-awareness as an ongoing dialogue between "self" and "other," Grant examines the ways in which Van Gogh's letters raise, from within themselves, questions and issues to which they also respond. Their literary quality, he argues, derives in part from this "double-voiced discourse"-from the power of the letters to thematize, through their own internal dialogues, the very structure of self-fashioning itself. Far from merely reproducing the narrative of the artist's personal progress, "the letters enable readers to recognize how necessary yet open-ended, constrained yet liberating, confined yet unpredictable, are the means by which people seek to shape a place for themselves in the world."

List of illustrationsPreface

Introduction: The Dialogical Structure of Self-Fashioning

1. The Painterly Writer
2. Binaries, Contradictions, and "Arguments on Both Sides"
3. Reading Van Gogh's Letter-Sketches
4. Imagination and the Limits of Self-Fashioning

Conclusion: Envoi

Notes / Index