Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives
Date
2019-08-01
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Abstract
Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives excavates the documents, both archival and published, of politically-inclined works by Guy Vanderhaeghe, Katherine Govier, and Robert Kroetsch to examine depictions of progressivism and agrarian socialism in 20th-century western Canada. The fonds serve as case studies to theorise archival presence, absence, and trace. I conclude by unpacking the politics inherent to the archive and the practice of academic collection. Specifically, I examine how digitisation radicalises the archive’s spatiality and alters the relationship between author, text, reader, and archive to serve a necromantic function: it raises the author as an uncanny simulation, a revenant coming back to the text, the selection, the present. Drawing on the works of Jacques Derrida and others, I show how this evocation deconstructs the archive’s own nature, becoming a mystical enunciation that haunts the ecology of the digital environment. Poems and flash fictions introduce each of the thesis’ chapters, adopting the style and/or subject matter of the primary texts to reflect the themes that will be discussed and to engage with the discourses that will be employed in the critical writing that follows. My project employs a creative, conceptual, practice-based, and meta-cognitive approach to research that re-collects authors’ texts and characters, but also interpretations thereof, blurring the boundaries between genres of academic writing.
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archive, regionalism, western canada, metafiction
Citation
Bolay, J. (2019). Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.