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

1959年，T. S.艾略特说，他宁愿把一首“未完成的”诗“留在我的脑海里，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。尽管这看起来是一种创作上的怪癖，但艾略特对信息存储形式的创造性区分同样占据了弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的《往事素描》（1939）的写作，她回忆说，她发现了"一捆笔记，扔进了我的废纸篮“。作为一个与她的记忆相关的主题，伍尔夫的比喻“篮子”融合了艾略特声称的两种存储形式，这两种存储形式是如此关键的不同;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个比较心理和物质存储设备的复杂历史，以及它们作为档案的感知有用性。Douwe Draaisma的《记忆的隐喻》（Metaphors of Memory，2000）通过用来概念化我们的记忆能力的图像来追踪这一对话，注意到20世纪初的一个深刻转变，因为技术进步为我们提供了新的隐喻可能性。尽管雅克·德里达（Jacque Derrida）在《档案热》（Archive Fever）（1995）中的干预为信息保留方法的理论方法铺平了道路，但德拉埃斯马的关键现代例子，包括弗洛伊德的《神秘的记事本》（Mystic Champing-Pad）（1925），尚未与作家的理论进行比较，这些作家不仅在作品中探索了材料和纪念物的保存，但积极实践他们的想法，在他们的存档这些相同的作品。学习历史编纂学，文化记忆和档案科学的发展，其中公正的档案管理员的概念已被根除，重要的工作在英语已围绕亨利詹姆斯，调查他销毁文学文献的行为是如何达到只为他的记忆而保存部分过去的目的。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档案来控制自己死后的声誉？这在多大程度上促成了新批评的兴起和对传记见解的全盘否定？然而，也有证据表明，作家们不仅从实际出发，而且从理论上思考了他们存储信息的方法。通过将本研究扩展到包括T. S.艾略特，R. G.科林伍德，赫伯特阅读，和弗吉尼亚伍尔夫，我们能够探讨存在的知识分子谁集成档案理论到每个阶段的组成和出版过程中未经研究的网络。因此，我们扩大了辩论，从暴露某些作家的批评声誉是自我构建的，到一个利用现代主义文学文化中的材料和纪念存储的创造性能力的哲学建议。作为一种尚未建立的联系，研究不仅将审查这些人的作品及其与执行人的通信，而且还将审查这些作品幸存下来的方式。莉亚价格在维多利亚时代的汇编档案选集的历史上取得了重大进展，她的书的历史调查将在接下来的几十年里这些活动的公开理论化的检查很好地支持。这种双重的方法已经被文艺复兴时期的学者如罗德里刘易斯（Rhodri Lewis）所使用，并取得了巨大的成功，在那里，一种对普通文献的分类法已经被置于ars memoriae传统的背景中。随着艾略特和伍尔夫对这一时期的写作方法特别感兴趣，奥登和福斯特甚至出版了他们自己的普通书籍，这种不为人注意的创造性笔记的复兴及其与记忆和写作的关系将为一个在电子书研究中蓬勃发展的领域提供一条新的途径。

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