Archives Digital and Otherwise: Recent Books on Archiving Canadian Writing

References to various turns—digital, spatial, archival, affective—have become commonplace in humanities scholarship. We might consider the notion of an archivalturn, curious in disciplines in which archival work has always played a significant role. Archival work may have waned in the humanities during the ascension of continental theory—post-structuralism, in particular—due to a perception of positivism in archival research; through that same moment, however, the new historicism maintained archival work as a key practice within literary studies. But the archival turn might be read less as involving a return to archival research than a transformative reconsideration of the archive and what constitutes archival research itself. These questions are prompted by the digitization of the traditional archive and the extension of a self-archiving network into all human communication practices, and they are of crucial importance both to the humanities and to the preservation of collective memory.

Several volumes published in recent years both refer to and demonstrate these various turns, two of which further frame their critical questions through gender. Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace, (2012) builds upon earlier work that rethought the archive in a Canadian context, specifically Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents, (Buss and Kadar, 2001), and ReCalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production, (Blair et al. 2005). If those earlier collections pointed to limits of conventional archives and archival methodologies in documenting women’s writing practices and challenged the notion that an archive is somehow objective or neutral, the essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace, further question orthodox notions of the material archive, documenting changing understandings of what an archive is, how we might interact with it, and what delimits its boundaries.

While most of the contributors to the volume are academics, contributions by non-academic writers are included. Daphne Marlatt, who has done substantial archival work herself in poetic projects such as Steveston, and Vancouver Poems, discusses the “sense of invaded privacy around more personal documents” (27) the archive can produce in writers whose papers are housed there. Penn Kemp ponders the distinction between print and digital archives and their implications: “A depth of personality surfaces in the particularities of a print edit: heavy or tentative pencil corrections to a manuscript grant the researcher apparent access to specific creative processes” (128). Kemp reminds us that much is lost to the historical record in the transition from analogue to digital modes of writing. Surprisingly, this is one of the few times in the collection that born-digital materials and their implications for archival research are raised. Susan McMaster is similarly self-reflexive about her own archive, noting that this archive is not just personal but is also the index of her engagement with a community, therefore including and implicating others, situating “the poet not as a single ego but as a working member of a cultural community” (214). All of these ruminations lead us to consider the implications for archives once writers become aware that their papers may, or indeed will, be archived. How does one’s writing—both literary, and non-literary,—then become a kind of self-fashioning? How might writers manipulate or mobilize their archives?

Some of the collection’s essays demonstrate how rethinking the archive is in part a response to neo-liberal economic imperatives and a culture of scarcity in libraries and universities and, relatedly but perhaps less pessimistically, technological developments. Cecily Devereux uses eBay...