My Own Portrait in Writing

A reading of Van Goghs collected correspondence by way of aset of ideas about dialogue and self-fashioning derived especially fromMikhail Bakhtin. Patrick Grants central claim is that VanGoghs letters raise from within themselves questions and issuesto which they also respond dialogically, thereby thematizing theprocess of self-fashioning within their own discourse. The manner inwhich they do so is a marker of the specifically literary dimension ofVan Goghs writing. Complementing Grants earlier criticalanalysis, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study(AU Press, 2014), this study brings Van Goghs collectedcorrespondence fully into the domain of modern literary studies, bothcritical and theoreticalas is long overdue.