What happens to literary manuscripts after the death of the author? Do they allow us to access the past? And how do we measure their philological, economic, or aesthetic value? Compared to cultural institutions such as libraries and museums, literary archives are a relatively recent invention (although practices of treasuring, collecting, and studying manuscripts predate such professionalization). In this seminar, we will reconstruct the history of the archive as an institution and discuss literary narratives about authors’ papers and their preservation and consumption. These fictional texts allow us to analyze how modern writers since the second half of the twentieth century have responded to the cultural history of the modern literary manuscript. We will cover a range of such “paper fictions,” including Muriel Spark’s short story “The Executor” (1983) (whose protagonist sells her uncle’s literary remains to a university-based archive but finds herself haunted by his posthumous presence), Carol Shields’s Swann (1987) (a postmodernist fiction that focuses on how scholars, biographers, archivist, and the reading public struggle to make sense of the manuscript legacy of a twentieth-century female poet), and A. S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning Possession: A Romance (1990) (a neo-Victorian historical novel which revolves around an archival paper chase that sees two modern literary scholars discovering a secret love story). Concentrating on questions of authorship, gender, and canonicity, the seminar will focus on how such suspense-driven narratives of archival discovery and loss deal with the relationship between manuscripts and texts, between the material and the intellectual, between the present and the past, and between life and art.
- Trainer/in: Tim Sommer