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.
Yesterday's discussion of repressed origins, psychoanalysis, "archive fever," and forbidden desires was left open-ended and we never got to do our close reading of Steedman's passages from Chapter 1. I may reintroduce those passages at a later date. They are rich, indeed.
In the meantime, as you look ahead to next week and to our next unit ("Social Memory as Intellectual History"), remember what you discovered during our brief "archival assemblage" activity. I call those passages "assemblages" because they reflect a re-assembling of beliefs and desires about what should be ordered and how it should be ordered, each time we come back to them. It is a re-assembling because we experience or don't experience "category disorder" differently according to the historical, cultural, or literary moment we are in.
For example, in the description of Dinah's drawer in Uncle Tom's Cabin, we are seeing Miss Ophelia's category disorder, and then experiencing it again on our own as we try to surmise why she would have noticed those things in the order that she did, why Dinah might have placed them there to begin with, and whether anyone was sure of their value. Whose notion of domestic order is being disrupted? Dinah's, Ophelia's, or ours?
In Ann Schenck's will, we are experiencing our own category disorder as we try to reconcile the odd blending of human bodies with dehumanized elements in the will, and try to make sense of a preferential family order. Depending on the values driving us, we might experience this disorder differently.
-Dr. Graban
