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

现代记忆的材料：二十世纪初文学档案的理论化

• 批准号: 2437113
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2437113
• 关键词: Materials; Modern; Memory; Theorising; Literary

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

1959年，t·s·艾略特在接受《巴黎评论》（Paris Review）采访时谈到了他的创作过程，他说，他宁愿把一首“未完成的”诗“留在脑海里，而不是放在抽屉里的纸上”。如果我把它放在抽屉里，它仍然是一样的东西，但如果它在记忆中，它就变成了别的东西。”艾略特对信息存储形式的创造性区分，虽然看似是一种创作怪才，但在弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf） 1939年的作品《过去的素描》（a Sketch of the Past）中也同样体现了这一点。伍尔夫在书中写道，她找到了“一捆纸条，扔进了我的废纸篓里”。作为与她的记忆相关的主题，伍尔夫比喻的“篮子”将艾略特所说的两种截然不同的存储形式混为一谈；对伍尔夫来说，记忆可以成功地用物质容器来表示。艾略特和伍尔夫的评论属于一段比较精神和物质储存装置的复杂历史，以及它们作为档案的感知用途。Douwe Draaisma的《记忆的隐喻》（2000）通过用来概念化我们的记忆能力的意象追踪了这一对话，注意到20世纪初技术进步为我们提供了新的隐喻可能性，这是一个深刻的转变。尽管雅克·德里达（jacques Derrida）在《档案热》（1995）中的介入，为信息保留方法的理论方法铺平了道路，但Draaisma的关键现代例子，包括弗洛伊德的《神秘书写板》（1925），还没有与作家的理论相比较，他们不仅探索了作品中的材料和纪念保存，而且积极地在这些作品的存档中实践了他们的想法。在史学、文化记忆和档案学的发展中，公正的档案保持者的概念几乎被根除了，从这些领域的发展中，我们了解到一些重要的英语工作是围绕亨利·詹姆斯展开的，研究他对文学文献的破坏是如何为自己的记忆保留部分过去的。当然，这也提出了一些实际问题：现代作家在多大程度上能够通过编辑他们的档案来控制他们死后的声誉，这在多大程度上促进了新批评主义的兴起和对传记见解的完全拒绝？然而，也有证据表明，作家们不仅从实践上考虑，而且从哲学上考虑他们的信息存储方法。通过将这项研究扩展到包括t·s·艾略特、r·g·科林伍德、赫伯特·里德和弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在内的个人圈子，我们能够探索一个未被研究的知识分子网络的存在，这些知识分子将档案理论融入了写作和出版过程的每个阶段。因此，我们将辩论从揭露某些作家的批评声誉是自我建构的，扩展到提出一种在现代主义文学文化中利用材料和纪念储存的创造性能力的哲学。由于尚未建立联系，这项研究不仅将检查这些个人的作品及其遗嘱执行人的通信，还将检查这些作品保存下来的方式。利亚·普莱斯在维多利亚时代将档案编纂为选集的历史上取得了重大进展，她的书-历史调查将在接下来几十年对这些活动的公开理论化的研究中得到很好的支持。这种双重方法被文艺复兴时期的学者如罗德里·刘易斯（Rhodri Lewis）使用，并取得了巨大的成功，在那里，一种普通文件的分类已经在ars memoriae传统中被语境化了。艾略特和伍尔夫对这一时期的编纂方法特别感兴趣，奥登和福斯特甚至出版了他们自己的普通书籍，创造性笔记的这种未被注意到的复兴及其与记忆和写作的关系将为一个蓬勃发展的研究领域提供新的途径