I offer a reminder that next week's schedule has been reversed: Tuesday (2/21) we are in Special Collections to further explore the Leora Pruitt King papers in all their riches; Thursday (2/23) we are in the regular classroom for a discussion of archiving for social, critical, and feminist consciousness. Next week marks the beginning of our third unit, and in this unit we may begin to think and talk more explicitly about archival erasure.
Here are some resources you might find useful for our work in Special Collections:
- Fiona Sullivan has offered some "Useful Tips for Reading Handwritten Documents."
- FSU's Sandra Varry posted to Illuminations a brief story about the collection you are now processing.
- David Gold's "'Eve Did No Wrong': Effective Literacy at a Public College for Women" makes use of a large number of archival documents in FSU's Special Collections to recreate the history of rhetorical education at Florida State College for Women.
- Several of the national and/or regional repositories listed on our "Course Resources" page contain collections or document figures (i.e., writers) from roughly the same chronological space as Nellie's matriculation at FSU. This may become more salient later on in the semester, for anyone interested in comparing her experiences to those documented experiences of other women students, writers, or teachers -- once we figure out who is who in the archives, of course.
Regarding next Thursday's readings: I have (guiltily) excerpted Burton's chapter. Her introduction offers us a way in to thinking about "archival logic" and makes a great companion piece to Blouin's punchy essay about social memory and to Ritter's reflective chapter about being a woman who necessarily (en)genders the archive she explores. I hope you enjoy them.
-Dr. Graban
