Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes, ed. Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2016. 431 pp.

Summary

Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes have edited an exciting volume with a focus on literary cultures of the long nineteenth century. Their primary concern is to deploy the concepts “archive” and “archiving” as interpretive tools for texts produced in the context of the nineteenth-century media revolution as well as its concomitant expansion of information and knowledge networks. Drawing on classical works theorizing the archive (Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida), as well as established and emerging scholarship in media theory and history, the volume frames texts as depositories of information, on the one hand. On the other, the volume seeks to outline how texts themselves perform archiving of information thematically or formally. Here, Archiv/Fiktionen considers how the documentation and storage of information presented in texts fosters literary self-reflectivity in which literature's own awareness as archive of knowledge or as mode permitting a deep engagement with archiving at a time of information excess emerges.

Archiv/Fiktionen is comprised of a comprehensive introduction and nineteen chapters divided into four sections. Section one, “Institutionen,” considers an array of techniques of archiving articulated through institutions such as the museum, the private collection, an Universalbiliothek, and collected works of authors. Contributions by Ulrike Vedder, Christine Weder, Michael Niehaus, and Philip Ajouri examine how such institutions instantiate an archive as much as they offer moments to critically reflect the process of archiving as, for instance, Niehaus does in his assessment of the fictive concept of a universal library. The universal library may contain all the knowledge of the world, but the necessity to present it as a non-functional archive articulates a futility of narrating archival fiction because of the impossibility to convey individual (his)stories. Section two, “Fiktionen,” expresses in which ways narrative strategies resemble archiving processes in select texts and to what end. The section features work by Stefan Willer, Nicolas Pethes, Torsten Hahn, Claudia Liebrand, and Rolf Parr, whose chapters offer examples of narrative texts preoccupied with the thematic of the archive. For example, Liebrand explains how Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's narrative approaches in select texts depend on a reimagining of an existing archive to form another, which, through this narrative transfiguration, (productively) distorts the aura of the original.