The Materials of Modern Memory: Theorising the Literary Archive in the Early Twentieth Century

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Discussing his drafting process with the Paris Review in 1959, T. S. Eliot remarked that he preferred to retain an 'unfinished' poem 'in the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else'. Though seemingly a compositional quirk, Eliot's creative distinction between forms of information storage similarly occupied Virginia Woolf's writing for A Sketch of the Past (1939), as she recounts finding a 'sheaf of notes, thrown away into my waste-paper basket'. As a motif associated with her memory, Woolf's figurative 'basket' conflates the two forms of storage that Eliot claimed were so crucially distinct; for Woolf, memory can be successfully represented by material receptacles. Eliot's and Woolf's remarks belong to a complex history of comparing psychic and material storage apparatus, and their perceived usefulness as archives. Douwe Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory (2000) tracks this conversation through the imagery used to conceptualise our memorial faculties, noticing a profound shift in the early twentieth century as technological advances lend us new metaphorical possibilities. Despite Jacque Derrida's intervention in Archive Fever (1995), which paved the way for a theoretical approach to methods of information retention, Draaisma's key modern examples, including Freud's 'Mystic Writing-Pad' (1925), have yet to be compared with the theory of writers who not only explored material and memorial preservation in their works, but actively practised their ideas in their archiving of those same works.Learning from developments in historiography, cultural memory, and archival science, where the notion of the impartial archivist has been all but eradicated, important work in English has revolved around Henry James, investigating how his destruction of literary documents amounted to an attempt to preserve portions of the past for his memory alone. Of course, this raises practical questions: to what extent have modern authors been able to control their posthumous reputations by editing their archives, and to what extent did this contribute to the rise of New Criticism and a rejection of biographical insights altogether? Yet there is also evidence that writers thought not only practically, but philosophically, about their approach to information storage. By extending this research into a circle of individuals including T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood, Herbert Read, and Virginia Woolf, we are able to probe the existence of an unstudied network of intellectuals who integrated archival theory into each stage of the composition and publication processes. As a result, we broaden the debate from exposing the critical reputations of certain writers as being self-constructed, towards a proposal for a philosophy of harnessing the creative capabilities of material and memorial storage within modernist literary culture. As a connection yet to be made, the research will not only examine the works of such individuals and correspondence with their executors, but also the manner in which those works have survived. Leah Price has made significant strides in the history of compiling archives as anthologies in the Victorian era, and her book-historical investigation will be well supported by an examination of the overt theorising of these activities in the following decades. This dual approach has been used with great success by such scholars of the Renaissance period as Rhodri Lewis, where a taxonomy of commonplacing documents has been contextualised within the ars memoriae tradition. With Eliot and Woolf in particular taking interest in methods of compilation of this period, and Auden and Forster going as far as to publish their own commonplace books, this unnoticed resurgence in creative notetaking and its relationship to memory and composition will provide a new avenue in a field that is thriving in the study of e