![]() ![]() But as stuff, it just sits there until it is read, and used, and narrativesed. It is indexed, it is catalogued, and some of it is lost. The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there … And nothing happens to this stuff, in the Archive. The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is human memory and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away that is the unconscious. “But in the actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. 4 – “The space of memory: in an archive” – Reflections on the Clio the Muse, and the concept of History as a process rather than a thing. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things discontinuities.” (p. And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing ever at all, though things certainly end up there. “… the archive that is the real Archive in ‘Archive Fever in not and never has been the repository of official documents alone. 3 – “The magistrates” – Case studies of how the poor and powerless appear in English legal records, and whether or not the historian really brings these people to life when studying these records. A lot about anthrax in this chapter as well as the introduction to the French historian Michelet.Ĭhap. 2 – “‘Something she called a fever’: Michelet, Derrida and dust” – More on fever, both the feeling of the historian deeply involved in learning from the material and the archive, and true fever, the occupational hazard of the researcher breathing in dust in the archive. ![]() 1 – “In the archon’s house” – a response to Derrida and an attempt to define what is the Archive Fever.Ĭhap. As Honor warned in LIS 438, “It will melt your brain!”Ĭhap. Or whatever it is that Derrida writes about, because I haven’t read Archive Fever yet myself, and it will be a challenge to understand it when I do. Nothing like reading a bunch of children’s books and then delving into deconstructionism and a response to the writings of Derrida on archives. This unique work will be welcomed by all historians who want to think about what it is they do. Steedman begins by asserting that in recent years much attention has been paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences she calls this practice "archivization." By definition, the archive is the repository of "that which will not go away," and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the "matter of history" can never go away or be erased. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material worldinherited from the nineteenth centurywith which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an originaland sometimes irreverentinvestigation into how modern historiography has developed.
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