Rise of the curator: archiving the self in contemporary American fiction
View/ Open
Date
02/07/2015Author
Lederer, Robert Clarke
Metadata
Abstract
Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an
intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has
flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has
contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a
personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and
fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and
its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing
on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of
the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two
chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What
I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates
moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma,
archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s
reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus,
discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of
stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of
archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms
of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information
overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of
“blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of
perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy.
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety
over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital
archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the
self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois
of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the
assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion
analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a
consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts
suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure.
Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread
means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively
circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it.