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Letters to America: Dialectical epistolarity in post-9/11 advertising
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Introduction
The forty-year-old words of Marshall McLuhan ring eerily true as an epigraph for
this paper. While this project grew out of an incident at skyscrapers, it is about the ads in
one medium that followed the attacks on those skyscrapers, and, more narrowly, about a
subset of those ads. The ads we examine in this paper take the form of letters, published
as full-page advertisements in the
1HZ <RUN 7LPHV in the week following September 11,
2001. As McLuhan noted, these ads, too, were constructed on a foundation of attitudes that
many people share: that special feeling you get when you receive a letter.
As a form or genre of interpersonal communication, the written letter holds a
special place in our hearts. A letter from a loved one in a faraway place is tangible,
something that loved one has touched and crafted, cried on, bled on, set aside time to work
on. It is more than simply the artful construction of phrases and paragraphs; it is a gestalt
of literary form and physical presence, a tangible reminder of the physical distance
between sender and receiver. A letter draws its poignancy from this dichotomy. Janet
Gurkin Altman writes that “as an instrument of communication between sender and
receiver, the letter straddles the gulf between presence and absence.... the letter lies
halfway between the possibility of total communication and the risk of no communication
at all” (1982, p. 43). Even more explicitly, Anne Bower writes that:
The letter seems “simple” and “traditional,” but with its layers of actual and
fictitious readers, with its special possibilities for rhetorical complications and
Convention