Lost in the archives / edited by Rebecca Comay.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Comay, Rebecca.

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Series:

Alphabet city (Toronto, Ont.) ; no. 8.

Alphabet city ; no. 8

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Memory in literature.

Memory in art.

Libraries in literature.

Physical Description:

771 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 28 cm.

Place of Publication:

Toronto, ON : Alphabet City Media, [2002]

Summary:

There is a crisis in the archives. Contemporary protocols for archiving and accessing increasingly vast amounts of materials present unprecedented possibilities and problems for the production, classification, and use of knowledge. Surveying the jagged edge between memory and forgetting, revealing the force and scope of some of memory's losses -- its technical drop-outs, its lacunae, burials, omissions, eclipses, and denials -- Lost in the Archives explores the thesis that memory is productively read from its failures and absences, in the not-yet or impossible archives, in archive fevers and dementias, in all the places archives cannot or have not looked. Like a purloined letter, the shelved and forgotten book wields its most virulent power precisely in being unread. Unread, if not indeed illegible, what is lost in the archive may prove to exert the most shocking force.

Notes:

"Lost in the archives was published as the companion volume to Canada's official entry-an exhibition titled, 'Next memory city' in the 8th International Venice Biennale for Architecture (2002)."--p. 3 of cover.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

0973055006

OCLC:

51498820