ENG 7110/7340: Archive Fevers

In this course, we will focus on several current trends in literary texts and theories that explore the politics of the archive. We will think about various manifestations of the “archive,” as a term that functions both literally and figuratively in cultural texts and spaces, and how these inform contemporary memory practices, theories, and narratives. We will interrogate the cultural and political uses of institutional and individual memory in shaping responses to traumatic pasts and precarious futures, and the ways in which such responses articulate apocalyptic anxieties in the face of global climate and refugee crises, cyber-security threats, and extinction politics. Assigned readings encompass debates on collective memory and archives, with attention to the following:
  • nostalgia as a political tool for recovering lost homes and “mementos” of the past in response to histories of environmental damage and experiences of mass migrations, deportations, and displacements of indigenous peoples, ethnic or religious minorities, and people of color;
  • the construction of globalized memory and/or geographies as an erasure of historical, cultural, and national specificities of traumatic “events,” such as invasion, slavery, genocide, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and ongoing ecological catastrophes;
  • and indigenous practices, postcolonial archives, oral history archives, and virtual archives as disruptive forms of historiography and writing/theorizing speculative futures.
Our readings of selected theoretical and literary texts will prompt exploration of the following questions: Are we capable of imagining a future that is politically transformative rather than ending in catastrophic destruction or repeating cycles of violence? What purpose does memory serve and what does it mean to survive or document the past when there is no possible future for human and/or nonhuman communities? How might the tools of new media and the digitization of archives be deployed toward social and environmental justice, or, to what extent might these work toward cultural amnesia and an erasure of the material past? By the end of the course, students will create an archive project alongside a seminar paper analyzing one to two of the assigned novels through a coherent theoretical framework and/or methodology.