Course Description & Goals
This semester, ENG 4938 offers Honors students a unique experience in the Florida State University Special Collections. We will recover, explore, and process the Pruitt-King papers, highlighting the personal and academic effects of a 1906 alumnus of Florida State College for Women. As we process these papers, we may help shape some important moments in feminist, institutional, and literary histories. The experiences you gain in Special Collections will be the jumping-off point for an original archival research project. As such, our course has 3 main goals:- to foster the habits of mind that are essential for creating and using archives;
- to mark critical intersections between feminist theories and theories of “archive”; and
- to approach archiving as scholarly investigation, cultural interpretation, social observation, and civic engagement, as well as a site for investigating alterity.
Class days will alternate between discussion, workshop, and research in FSU’s Special Collections (located in Strozier Library, on the main floor). Class readings will help to place the Pruitt-King papers in their broader historical and critical contexts while preparing us to consider the following questions: How do we represent “gender,” “race,” and/or “power” in the archives? How do those representations get remembered over time? When can we say that objects “tell the truth”? What are some contradictions between preservation and access? What does it mean that “we are what we collect”? Which speaks more loudly—representations of “as it was” or reflections on “as it could be”? When is archiving like mediation, disruption, vandalism, or erasure?
Because archiving is as much about noticing the absences as it is about attending to what (or who) is present, my hope is that you will become sensitive not only to the absences in institutional histories by and about women writers, but also to the “absences” in other projects you take up.
Course Outcomes
By the end of the term, you should feel equipped to do the following:- observe how different archives are organized and arranged;
- articulate the role that archives play in maintaining a community or institution’s sense of past, present, or future identity, for better and for worse;
- develop and reflect on your own research methodologies; and
- conduct an original archival research project.
Click here for course syllabus.
