product, but for a series of interactive responses. Sometimes in read-
ing we seek an author's response to a problem--how a narrative
enacts the writer's reaction to an event such as the Civil War or
twentieth-century ghetto life. Sometimes the search is for an
author's response to more formal issues--experimentation with a
particular genre or the use of time or intertextual recuperation of
another text. At other times we are more interested in the depiction
of a character's responses to people or to a changing self. And some-
times we seek our own responses to various textual elements . . . that
positive sense that a narrative, through its handling of characters
and point of view, setting, structure, story, and language, has al-
lowed expansion of old definitions of time, history, space, gender,
race, language, certain emotions, even self. ¹

Of course we can also respond negatively to aspects of a text.
Nevertheless, even when resisting some change a text offers, we have
the opportunity to explore the meanings of that rejecting response.
For instance, a reader may find a character in a novel revolting.
In Judith Fetterley's terms, we, as readers, may refuse "to identify
with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to" our own self-
hood ( Resisting Readerxii). Still, that very resistance begins a re-
sponse that can yield changed attitudes, beliefs, or even actions.

Epistolary works frame and feature these response processes.
The reading of any text can provide the opportunity for exploring
one's attitudes and beliefs, in concert with an author and the char-
acters, places, and events within that text. However, the lettered text,
with its repeated rectangles capturing one writer's reactions, then
moving to another writer's expression or the same writer's sub-
sequent recordings, privileges literature's power to provide a special
protected space and time for these responses. I use the word re-
sponses to embrace variety of possible intersections and reactions
of readers, literary characters, and authors (with plenty of room for
the question of intertextuality, too). More than other narrative
forms, letters, with their grounding in the ups and downs, ins and
outs of people's daily lives, emphasize how written responses are en-
acted in pieces, with revisions, discontinuously. The kind of respon-
siveness we find in (and through) letters is rather like the responsive
attitude Mary Catherine Bateson generalizes about in Composing A
Life: a "mode of action [that] is responsive rather than purposive:
it is based on looking and listening and touching rather than the
pursuit of abstractions" (234). In addition, even though the word

-2-