ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Ring Lardner’s love–hate relationship with postcard materialities, and how he measured affection in terms of epistolary effort. His outspoken commitments to conventional, private-letter correspondence betray his negative attitudes and feelings about communicating matters of personal intimacy via postcards and his literary allusions to postcards give symbolic expression to these same epistolary concerns. This chapter critically surveys Lardner’s writings to reveal the subtle rhetoric of material foreshadowing and metonymic signalling he employs by using postcards to perform the literary task of moral disclosure or to serve as default punchlines for the satirical humour of his journalism.
