ENG 273 - Topics: Archival Quests (1)

Contemporary approaches to curating, preserving, and presenting knowledge have fostered a literary and artistic fascination with manuscripts, archives, book history, and old media. Archival Quests integrates the study of fiction and poetry that embodies the idea of the archive with hands-on exploration of practical and ethical questions involved in archival work. Literary readings may include Geraldine Brooks’s historical novel, People of the Book, Muriel Rukeyser’s groundbreaking documentary poem The Book of the Dead, or Claudia Rankine’s multi-media collection of lyric essays, Citizen: An American Lyric. Archival work will engage with twentieth-century publications of Cornell’s Hillside Press in Cole Library’s archives, the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, and/or the M. Horvat Collection of Science Fiction Fanzines, also at the UI Special Collections. Part literary seminar, part lab work in book history and book art, part individualized research tutorial, part workshop in textual editing and e-publishing, Archival Quests will culminate in the creation of a class digital archive publicizing short fiction and poetry from the Hillside Press chapbooks. Prerequisite: writing designated course (W) or ENG 201.
(Humanities)