Books as Archives: Archival Poetics in Post-1980 Experimental Writing and Book Design

Abstract

In “Books as Archives: Archival Poetics in Post-1980 Experimental Writing and Book Design,” I develop a formal and historical poetics of what I call multimodal book-archives, an experimental mode of contemporary writing that tells stories through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artifacts. In forgoing any conventional concept of a narrator, the narratives and textual networks that book-archives construct are created through the interaction between texts that characters make, collect and transmit to others, ranging from handwritten letters and documents produced by word processors, to drawings, maps and photographs. Because book-archives combine verbal and pictorial modes, as well as different types of nonnarrative discourse like catalogues, exposition and argumentation, requiring a number of arduous and often nontraditional interpretive strategies such as the collation of verbal and pictorial elements, they pose important challenges to current theories of narrative and narrativity as well as to established approaches to reading and interpretation. Responding to these challenges, “Books as Archives” develops an archival poetics—a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission—that examines a range of techniques presented in different types of book-archives. I offer readings of book-archives produced by contemporary authors such as Bill Bly, Mark Z. Danielewski, Anne Carson, and Warren Lehrer, modeling how each of these authors construct different types of book-archives for different audiences and effects. Building on research in multimodal narrative theory (Herman, Ryan, Gibbons, et al) as well as digital media studies (Hayles, Pressman, Starre, et al), I contextualize the emergence of book-archives within different literary genealogies (e.g., the epistolary novel, encyclopedic fiction, artists’ books, electronic hypertext, and graphic narratives) to explain why and how so many contemporary books have taken this form. I argue that by including collections of textual material inside their covers, contemporary authors draw attention to how subjectivity, knowledge and cultural memory are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces. They explore these dynamics by experimenting with the material resources and expressive possibilities of the book—distinctly not “dead,” as so many thought—as an expressive and affective artifact.