Chapter 5: Letters as Windows into a Life of Praxis: Using the Epistolary Genre to Explore the Tensions Between the Private Self and Public Action

Academic writing is often characterized by impersonal abstraction. This has often been the case with the standard concept of a festschrift or other forms of homage to a particular scholar’s work. This chapter explores the use of the power of epistolary genre to give salience to personal stories, appreciative reflections, and dialogue through a case study that emerged out of a bricological collection of over 80 letters written to Maxine Greene. As Sonia Nieto clearly describes, “The power of the epistolary genre resides in precisely this: it makes a private act public and it gives others access to insights and wisdom that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. In the process, it allows readers to see the interactions between two people who have a personal connection, one of whom has agreed to let others listen in on the conversation”(as cited in Lake, 2010, p. x1). In this chapter, I make use of these letter conversations to focus on what these personal connections express about Maxine Greene’s lived experience as situated and embodied philosophy. The role of the public intellectual requires a consciousness of how one conducts their life and beliefs. There will always be tensions between the way we see and know ourselves with the way that others critically or at times adoringly see us, but through the eyes, ears, and mouths of the many that encounter us, our existential selves become a part of lived history. This case study confirms that in the case of Maxine Greene, her public life and her teaching and scholarship are all holistically united at the core.