"Arch-ival Initiations"
Call For Papers
Midwest Modern Language Association
Minneapolis, MN
November 8-10, 2002
This panel seeks to examine the task of thinking in regards to the problem of
the archive. As a guarded resource that is commencement and commandment,
inscription and imprinting, form and force, etc., the notion of the archive
announces the literariness of the record. However, despite its fictive
nature, it performs as a privileged site of record and thus as a resource of
pre-supposed reference, authority, and meaning. The ultimate stakes of such
privilege constitute, and in turn necessitate, an orientation—a politics—
towards problems of the participation, recognition, access, and
interpretation of something called the archive. This panel welcomes
submissions that attempt to read the politics of the writing of the archive.
Namely, how do we think and bring to bear the technical iterability and
interposition of the archive in a manner that engages and confronts the force
of the law(s) that guard and disseminate it? Is there nothing outside of the
law of the archive? And if there is not, how may we indeed speak and
experience such an impossibility?
We encourage submissions that brave the reading of the archive in its moments
of articulation in order to comprehend the politics of its technical
mechanisms. It is the aspiration of this panel that such readings will
perform across a number of disciplines (history, new media, literature,
religion, psychoanalysis, philosophy, biography, etc.) upon a variety of
different problems (periodization, testimony, the law, the body, trauma,
narrative, etc.), and provide incentive for a new understanding of the
immediacy between the control and the writing of the archive.
Please send e-mail abstracts (250-500 words)for a 17 minute presentation and
contact information to Todd Karnas and Tim Deines at karnasto@msu.edu before
April 24, 2002 to be considered. Inquiries in advance of a formal abstract
are welcome.
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