Prof. Tanya Agathocleous
[email protected]

ENG 890.00
Fri 11:45-1:45, Rm 4422

Theories and Fictions of the Archive

This course will use a broad range of literary and theoretical writings on archives as a way to think through the implications, methodologies and problems posed by archival research. What counts as an archive and how are archives constituted, imaginatively, materially, and politically? What is their relation to institutions, corporations, and states? What makes archives accessible or inaccessible? How do material archives deal with questions of curation, restoration, preservation and representation? What kinds of affects do archives have and what kinds of affects do we bring to them?

We will focus in particular on nineteenth-century colonial and imperial archives as well as on a range of NYC archives, which we will visit. Final projects will be grounded in original archival research and can take the form of a conventional seminar paper or a digital archive, built individually or collaboratively.

Class Schedule:

August 31
Introduction—Syllabus, Schedule, Introduction
  • Borges, “Library of Babel”
September 7
What is an Archive?
  • Keyword: archive
  • Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”
  • Foucault, from the Archaeology of Knowledge
  • Derrida, from Archive Fever
September 14
What is an Archive? cont’d
  • Antoinette Burton, “Introduction,” Archive Stories
  • Jennifer Milligan, “What is an Archive in the History of Modern France”
  • W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
September 21
The Personal Archive
  • Jordan Stein, “Archival Crying”
  • Walter Benjamin’s Archive
  • Dominic La Capra, “On Grubbing in my Personal Archives”
September 28
Visit to NYU Fales Rare Books library, Charlotte Priddle
October 5
Visit to Schomburg Center
  • David Greetham, “Who’s In, who’s Out: The Cultural Politics of Archival Exclusion”
October 12
Class is cancelled / ****Mid-term paper due****
October 19
The Victorian Archive, guest Meredith Martin, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton Prosody Archive, Princeton University
  • Paul Fyfe, “Technologies of Serendipity” and “An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers”
  • Meredith Martin, “Counting Victorian Prosodists”
  • Helena Michie and Robyn Warhol, from Love among the Archives
October 26
The Imperial Archive, guest Todd Shepard, Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the Johns Hopkins University
  • Thomas Richards, from The Imperial Archive
  • Adele Perry, “The Colonial Archive on Trial”
  • Tony Ballantyne, “Mr. Peal’s Archive: Mobility and Exchange in Histories of Empire”
November 2
The Imperial Archive cont’d
  • Anjali Arondekar, from For the Record
  • Todd Shepard, “Of Sovereignty” and “History is Past Politics”
  • Ann Stoler, from Along the Archival Grain
November 9
The Feminist Archive
  • Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”
  • Carolyn Steedman, “Something She called a Fever”
  • Antoinette Burton, from Dwelling in the Archive
  • Laura Doan, from Disturbing Practices
November 16
Queering the Archive
  • Marshall, Murphy, Tortorici, “Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings”
  • Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox
  • Oscar Wilde, Portrait of Mr. W.H. (optional)
November 23
Class is cancelled (Thanksgiving weekend)
November 30
Race and the Archive
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen
  • Christina Sharpe, from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
December 7
Visit to New York Public Library, Gay and Lesbian Collections, Jason Baumann
December 14
The Archive as Media/the Media as Archive
  • Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
  • Kazanjian, “Freedom’s Surprise”
  • Best, “Slavery and the Visual Archive”
December 20 *****Final Paper due*****
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