Between Aura and Access

Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21534102
AutoresTim Sommer (0000-0002-0039-3962, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen138
Número3
Páginas384-403
Fecha de publicación2020-09-15
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAnglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0340-5222 • E-ISSN: 1865-8938
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ang-2020-0035
OpenAlexW3092142158
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas21

This article analyses narratives inspired by the institutional emergence of the literary archive. It focuses in particular on what historian Arlette Farge has described as the “allure of the archives”: the elusive immediacy of encounters with artefactual remnants of the past. Key to this experience is what has often been described as the ability of archival objects to conjure up the presence of their creators – a process that at the same time paradoxically depends on the uniqueness and fundamental ‘unapproachability’ of the artefact. Through regulating and restricting access to documents, the archive thus maintains their distance and simultaneously makes them available for acts of reverential consumption. Focusing on such forms of gatekeeping and consecration, the article reads Henry James’s novella “The Aspern Papers” (1888) and Martha Cooley’s novel The Archivist (1998) to enquire how the literary archive – both as an idea and as an institution – has shaped ways of thinking about the relationship between physical absence and auratic presence

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Archivist · Art · Consecration · Epistemology · Exemplification · Gatekeeping · Immediacy · Institution · Literature · Narrative · Novella · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · History · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture

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