Archive Fever
Leslie Jamison
Fall 2023
Tuesdays 1:10pm – 3:10pm
Archives are records of minds and bodies and secrets. They are full of surprises: the cigarette burns marking John Berryman’s 12-step inventories; the jam-sticky fingerprints of Marilynne Robinson’s toddler son in her composition books, where novel fragments live alongside grocery lists; the instructions to Jean Rhys’s caregivers to put more ice cubes in her evening tumblers of whiskey, the postcards sent from 19th-century sanitarium patients to beloveds living elsewhere. In this course, we will be exploring the allure of the archives—their enchantments, their tyrannies, their obfuscations, their practicalities, their labyrinthine passageways—and thinking about how creative work can incorporate archival research in surprising and dynamic ways. Archives are necessarily incomplete, and their gaps are just as resonant as their records. In addition to reading critical and creative work that draws from archival research, we will be visiting a number of archives across New York City, including the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center, the Fales Library at NYU, and the New York Academy of Medicine, as well as our own Rare Books and Manuscripts Library here at Columbia. Our readings will range across genres--creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry—and will include Saidiya Hartman, Arlette Farge, Mark Nowak, Kiki Petrosino, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Maggie Nelson. We will also have a special guest visit from Hannah Gold, an alumna of this course (!) who will speak about her own archival writings and about the role this course played in the trajectory of her creative life and archival interests. Over the course of the semester, each student will submit a journal of our archival encounters and produce a piece of creative writing that draws on sustained engagement with a particular set of archival materials.
READINGS
Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried
“Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Ann Stoler
Hannah Gold:
“David Wojnarowicz’s Home in the City” (Paris Review Daily)
“Bold Fury” (N+1)
“Emails Are Forever” (Astra)
“The Archives of the East Village Eye” (NewYorker.com)
Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip
“In the Rooms of Monticello,” Kiki Petrosino
Coal Mountain Elementary, Mark Nowak
Jane: A Murder, Maggie Nelson
More Readings
The Diary Keepers, Nina Siegal
Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, Melville’s Marginalia
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
Charles Reznikoff, Testimony
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
Catherine Venable Moore, “The Book of the Dead” (Oxford American)
Timothy Garton Ash, The File
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, In the Freud Archives
The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman
Frail Sister, Karen Green
Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives, Amelia Possanza
The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
In the Skin of the Lion, Michael Ondaatje
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples
Paper Love, Sarah Wildman
M Archive, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Deborah Miranda
SCHEDULE
September 5
Course Introduction
The Allure of the Archives, Arlette Farge (BC)
September 12
“Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman (PDF)
Excerpt from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman (PDF)
Excerpt from All That She Carried, Tiya Miles (PDF)
September 19
Offsite Class: Materials Workshop at Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library
“Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Ann Stoler (PDF)
September 26
Offsite Class: NYU Fales Library
October 3 (No class)
October 10
Offsite class: NYPL
October 17
Class visit: Hannah Gold. Please read the following selection of her essays:
“David Wojnarowicz’s Home in the City” (Paris Review Daily)
“Bold Fury” (N+1)
“Emails Are Forever” (Astra)
“The Archives of the East Village Eye” (NewYorker.com)
October 24
Offsite Class: Morgan Library
Due: Archive Journal (Part I).
Notes on Archive Journal: Please send the partial Archive Journal to me as a digital file (PDF or word doc) with the subject line: Archive Journal. This first installment should include 3 entries: responses to the first three of our class archive visits (Columbia RBML, NYU, and the NYPL)
October 31
Offsite class: New York Academy of Medicine
November 7
No class (University Holiday)
November 14
Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip (BC)
“In the Rooms of Monticello,” Kiki Petrosino (PDF)
November 21
Offsite Class: Schomburg Center
November 28
Coal Mountain Elementary, Mark Nowak (BC)
December 5
Jane: A Murder, Maggie Nelson (BC)
December 12 (Make-up session and final class)
Student presentations on archive projects
Due: Hard copy of Archive Project, and complete Archive Journal.
Notes on Archive Journal: Please send the complete Archive Journal to me as a digital file (PDF or word doc) with the subject line: Complete Archive Journal. It should include 8 entries in total: responses to all six of our class archive visits (Columbia RBML, NYU, NYPL, Morgan Library, New York Academy of Medicine, and the Schomburg Center.)
ASSIGNMENTS
Archive Journal: Due 10/24 (partial) and 12/12 (complete).
I’d like you each to write brief responses (500-750 words) to each of our class archive visits, and compile these responses into an ongoing document that will serve as a record of your archival engagements this term. In this document, I’d also like to include brief responses to two of your independent archive visits for your final creative project (see below). These journal responses should ideally be a mixture of descriptive/informational—responding to the contents of the archives, particular objects or documents that fascinated you—and experiential: what the archives felt like, what your body felt like within them, how they felt inviting and/or alienating, what you found yourself imagining in response to what you found. What enchanted you? What angered you? These journals are informal, and you have a fair amount of freedom in how you construct these journal responses—more than anything, it’s meant to prompt you to respond to the archives as we go—and you might even experiment with framing each response a slightly different way: One might focus largely on the material properties of an archive (the feel and look of the paper in various documents, the physicality of the room itself, the smells and temperature) while another might focus on what’s missing from the archive, another on the manner and approach of the archivists, another on speculative imagining based on archival materials, etc. That’s just one way to approach it.
I’ll ask you to submit a digital copy of the journal mid-way through the semester, at which point it will include responses to our first three archive visits (Columbia’s RBML, NYU Fales, and the NYPL). You’ll also submit the complete document as a digital file at the end of the semester, with eight entries in total, from our six class archive visits and two of your independent archive visits.
Archive Project: 7-10 pages, double-spaced. Due 12/12.
As the culmination of your engagement with archives this term, each of you will submit a piece of creative writing at the end of the semester that rises out of sustained independent engagement with a set of archival materials from one of the archives we visit of the course of the semester. Your project can involve any genre you choose—creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry; or something that hovers between—and should be focused on materials that go beyond (or are entirely unrelated) to materials we saw as a class. You should visit the archives independently at least twice in order to spend time with the materials you’re working with. (You will also write brief journal responses about two of these visits, as specified above.)
Over the course of the semester, we’ll be visiting six different archives. At each of these archives, we’ll be looking at particular materials as a class but also getting a sense of their broader holdings, and meeting at least one archivist who works with their collections. For your individual projects, I’d like you to choose one archive to return to in order to spend more time with some of its materials. You might end up digging much more deeply into a collection surrounding something we see as a class, but—more likely—you’ll use online finding materials, or a consultation with the archivist, to identify some materials you’d like to engage with and respond to. I’m also available to help you with this process at any point along the way. I know it can be daunting! That’s part of why I’m teaching this class. To make archives feel more accessible, and I am a resource to you at any point in the process.
As mentioned, you should visit the archives at least twice, independently, to spend time with your materials. If you’d like to visit more than twice, wonderful! But it’s not a requirement. From that independent research, and hopefully drawing on the texts we read over the semester, which manifest a variety of forms, structures, styles and genres in their response to archives, you’ll write a creative response of 7-10 pages that you’ll submit to me at the end of the semester. You’ll also give a brief (5 minute) presentation on your Archive Project during our final class. This presentation should not involve reading from your project, but rather describing it: your conception for it, your execution of it, and the independent archive visits that contributed to its writing. You can use visual images or a PowerPoint if you want, but it’s not required!