HLVK03682U The archive in theory and literary analysis

The course presents the archive as both a theoretical concept and a concrete analytical praxis. Via a reading of the concepts of the archive in Benjamin, Derrida, Foucault et.al. the course proposes to examine archival aspects of concrete literary works: In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of the father appears as paradoxical incorporation, i.e. as an archival trace, demanding a new moral and governmental order. In the Bible, the Old Testament’s archive of a people invites scrutiny of Moses as an historical figure and a fictional victim of the patricide of the people. This poses the question of archival repression as the condition of “normality” (Santner) and collective “vitality” (Zizek). The stories of Borges develop a literary exploration of the structure of the archive – from indexation, “retrieval,” interpretation and enactment to the dangers of “total recall” and the absurdity of the total archive. Finally, Sebald’s Austerlitz is a radical archival entity, which not only examines the archival consciousness of the protagonist and the modern subject in general, but also incorporates various archival materials in the fiction of the novel. The goal of the course’s proposed dialogue between a theoretical field and concrete works is to present the archive as not just an object, storage technology or structure of power to be described, used or challenged but also as a strategy of literary analysis.