The Archive: Literary Perspectives on the Intersections between History and Fiction — Introduction

Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Anat Weisman, Vered Karti Shemtov

Research output: Contribution to journalEditorial

Abstract

In Archive Fever, one of the most well-known lectures on archives, Jacques Derrida argues that “even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could do neither without substance nor without residence.”[1] By looking at the relationships between art and archives, the articles in this issue of Dibur discuss the role that literature and cinema play today in being a residency for archives and in providing a space for selecting and reflecting on the archive’s substance. The articles explore how art interacts with archives, the nature of the relationship between archive, memory, and oblivion, and how literary works and films can themselves become a kind of archive and, by so doing, serve as a space for reflecting on the archive as a concept. We ask how literature and film question the historical and fictional aspects of the archive, its hermeneutic, its preservation versus its construction of narratives. We look at the intersection between art and archive as a productive space for playing with the dynamics between voicing and silencing, past and becoming, singular and collective, oblivion and focalization, and much more. This issue raises questions such as the extent to which the act of archiving serves as a way to slow down oblivion or even to censor. And are there forbidden archives and hidden archives that can appear only through works of fiction?
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-4
Number of pages4
JournalDibur Literary Journal
Volume3
StatePublished - 2016

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