Between Aura and Access
Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21534102 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Sommer (0000-0002-0039-3962, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 138 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 384-403 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-15 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0340-5222 • E-ISSN: 1865-8938 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ang-2020-0035 |
| OpenAlex | W3092142158 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 21 |
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
Roads to Rome
Production of Presence
The Allure of the Archives
Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines
Sacred commodities
Henry James and the Abuse of the Past
Henry James and the Abuse of the Past
Kissing Christians
Archive Fever
Archive Fiction
After the Archive
The Catholic Side of Henry James
Revising Henry James
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |