Dickinson & the Materiality of Literature: A personal example

Reflecting on our recent class work on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and specifically, the way in which she presented her work in a way that subverts our understanding of what typically constitutes our engagement with a text - I noticed that in my personal writings, I had actually demonstrated a vaguely similar approach.

The images above show some of my notes written at various times across a week I spent in the downtown area of Las Vegas, NV in August 2017. Although I have not had the time to process these initial thoughts into a series of short stories and articles (which is the final goal), these notes represent my raw reactions to my brief time in the city while also referencing other works of pop culture and literature which have influenced me. Although somewhat obscure, the main subject of my writing here concerned the desert as a landscape, the death of the American dream, the extreme and savage nature of Las Vegas and the way in which an individual might interact with this environment in order to find what they are looking for, both literally and metaphorically.

However, one of my favorite things about writing out these notes in my hotel room, and one of my favorite things about looking back on them - is that they are written on the customized paper of the specific hotel I was staying at. There is something sadistically ironic and pleasing to me about writing a fun critique of the environment I was in while writing it on materials which, in some sense, represent my own subscription to this culture which in my writing, I claim to (partially) oppose.

To me, this recalls Dickinson's notion of the physical materials used to present literature being implicated in the overall meaning that this literature translates to its reader. Strangely, this is not something I had contemplated before having dealt with Dickinson's work in this class - but I have since spent some time thinking this through and considering to what extent my subconscious had enjoyed writing on the hotel paper because of the ways in which it informed my understanding of the notes I had written. Although I haven't formed a cohesive conclusion about how Dickinson's practice might relate to my notes from Las Vegas, I do believe that there is some significance here & I like the idea that this idea of materiality in literature is something that has persisted in the field.