Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory

Helle, Anita; Plath, Sylvia; Kukil, Karen V.; Middlebrook, Diane Wood; Peel, Robin; Bundtzen, Lynda K.; Brain, Tracy; Moses, Kate; Nelson, Deborah

doi:10.2307/20459055

Cited by 44 publications

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“…The important purpose of some archives is to create a wholeness as the basis for scholarly research. As Anita Helle (2005) notes, ''A literary archive functions traditionally as a guarantee that a body of work belongs to the author's self, in propria persona (in her own body)''-allowing scholars to count some documents as ''within'' the scope of research and allowing scholars to neglect some documents as external to the research (633). Helle affirms that ''the archive in modern history functions as a largely imaginary 'whole,''' allowing the scholar to circumscribe a body of documents for analysis and to declare that body of documents complete.…”

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Beard

2008

Arch Sci

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The defining trope for the humanities in the last 30 years has been typified by the move from ''work'' to ''text.'' The signature text defining this move has been Roland Barthes seminal essay, ''From Work to Text.'' But the current move in library, archival and information studies toward the ''document'' as the key term offers challenges for contemporary humanities research. In making our own movement from work to text to document, we can explicate fully the complexity of conducting archival humanistic research within disciplinary and institutional contexts in the twenty-first century. This essay calls for a complex perspective, one that demands that we understand the raw materials of scholarship are processed by disciplines, by institutions, and by the work of the scholar. When we understand our materials as constrained by disciplines, we understand them as ''works.'' When we understand them as constrained by the institutions of memory that preserve and grant access to them, we understand them as ''documents.'' And when we understand them as the ground for our own interpretive activity, we understand them as ''texts.'' When we understand that humanistic scholarship requires an awareness of all three perspectives simultaneously (an understanding demonstrated by case studies in historical studies of the discipline of rhetoric), we will be ready for a richer historical scholarship as well as a richer collaboration between humanists and archivists.The ''document'' as a conceptual field is making inroads into library science, information studies and related fields, but remains alien in the traditional humanities (English, history, communication, rhetorical studies). The recent issue of Archival Science devoted to papers from the Document Academy conference (held in 2008, published in 2009) demonstrates vigorous efforts to introduce the term more fully into the community of archivists and

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confidence: 99%

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Beard

2008

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Feminine Authorial Mournings: The Female Writer on Screen and the Trauma of the Present

Shachar

2019

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Elizabeth Bishop in Context

2021

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Elizabeth Bishop is increasingly recognised as one of the twentieth century's most original writers. Consisting of thirty-five ground-breaking essays by an international team of authors, including biographers, literary critics, poets and translators, this volume addresses the biographical and literary inception of Bishop's originality, from her formative upbringing in New England and Nova Scotia to long residences in New York, France, Florida and Brazil. Her poetry, prose, letters, translations and visual art are analysed in turn, followed by detailed studies of literary movements such as surrealism and modernism that influenced her artistic development. Bishop's encounters with nature, music, psychoanalysis and religion receive extended treatment, likewise her interest in dreams and humour. Essays also investigate the impact of twentieth-century history and politics on Bishop's life writing, and what it means to read Bishop via eco-criticism, postcolonial theory and queer studies.

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Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory

Cited by 44 publications

References 0 publications

From work to text to document

From work to text to document

Feminine Authorial Mournings: The Female Writer on Screen and the Trauma of the Present

Elizabeth Bishop in Context

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