“This is my letter to the World”

This new library exhibition pairs facsimiles of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts with "post-digital" writing by ES students. Drawing inspiration from Dickinson’s defiance of nineteenth-century print technology (only 10 of Dickinson’s 1700+ poems were printed during her lifetime, and these likely without her permission), the MA students have created a set of fascinating textual objects specially crafted to resist digitalisation. Unlike the text you are reading now, these messages cannot be transmitted digitally. Most, in fact, require the receiver to take them in their hands. In several cases, the “post” of the students’ “post”-digital creations alludes to Dickinson’s celebrated envelope-poems, manuscripts in which the poet turned her epistolary medium literally inside out. The students’ works too are “letter[s] to the World,” a domain unreachable on the World Wide Web.

Feel free to remove the works from the exhibition case. Most ask to be unfolded. But, when you handle the objects, mind the note that Dickinson once inserted in an envelope addressed to her friend Susan Huntington Gilbert, “open me carefully  –”

28th March 2025, 6 p.m.
UB English Literature and Linguistics

Introduction by Philip Gerard.
The creators (with the exception of Dickinson) will be on hand to speak about their projects and answer questions.
Come and join us for a drink and some nibbles and admire the students’ creative work!

The vernissage  is our contribution to this year's BiblioWeekend festivities and our response to its general theme"Words connect worlds".