Denotative Fictions and Institutional Value

Dear All,

A former mentor and dear friend forwarded the link to Correal's recovery story last week (appearing in Friday's edition of The New York Times) just as I was preparing notes for today's discussion of Finnegan's piece. It stuck with me.

Perhaps it came as a light-hearted balm at a difficult time. Perhaps it came as an opportune case study for self-reflection or critique. For whatever reason, Correal's essay made me look again at Finnegan's shack/sharecropper problem (Finnegan 120) as a problem of institutional value. In what ways are we institutionalized to the point where we unqestioningly carry the value of our institutions into how we encounter the archive? Institutional belonging is powerful and intricate -- we belong to a discipline, a school, a department, a way of thinking/being/writing/reading, and that is just within FSU, not even considering those other social, moral, political, or religious institutions that form our identities.

Assemblage, Category Disorder, and Readings Next Week

Dear All,

As promised I announce a change in next week's readings.

• For Tuesday, please read Nesmith and Finnegan, both in CL.
• For Thursday, please read Jimerson (in CL) and 2 of the following 3 in K&R: Gold "Accidental," Sharer "Traces," Rohan "Stitching and Writing."

For some light reading on the side, check out this recovery story by Annie Correal, in today's edition of The New York Times.

Steedman and Jimerson -- Dust and Archives Power

Dear Folks,

We are back in our regular classroom on Thursday, to discuss Chapter 1 of Carolyn Steedman's Dust and (coincidentally) Chapter 1 of Randall Jimerson's Archives Power. Metaphors abound in the early portions of each chapter (and, in fact, Mattias makes a cameo appearance in Jimerson's pages).

Give yourself time to dwell in each chapter -- time to work through their claims, to annotate terms that are new or unfamiliar in their usage, and to consider the challenge in each chapter. Someone  or some idea or some activity or some perspective is being challenged in each piece, and that's part of what we will discuss on Thursday.

Some Resources for Problem-Solving Exercise #1

Dear Folks,

As promised, here are some sources that might help you along.

"Who Owns the Past?"

Hello, Archiving Folks.

I was reflecting on some of the things you noticed during Dean McCormick's introduction to the FSU Special Collections yesterday, not only about how the Special Collections becomes what it is, but also about the constraints we will experience as we seek institutional resources for the first Problem-Solving Exercise. That called to mind one of Hunter's powerful (I think) implications about archives and manuscripts in his "Introduction" -- the implication that, in most cases, history would never be known (or understood as a "history") if someone had not deliberately curated it.

Welcome Message

Welcome to ENG 4938 for the spring 2017 semester! This dedicated blog space will host announcements, updates, gateways for assignments and journal prompts, and a forum for conversation as we embark on our research. Feel free to browse the links at right to preview (or review) any of our course documents.

-Dr. Graban