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- Title
ARCHIVAL EXCESS: SENSATIONAL HISTORIES BEYOND THE AUDIOVISUAL.
- Authors
McMurray, Peter
- Abstract
Despite the increased interest in critical archival studies in recent years, most scholarship and theory still tends to consider archives as primarily textual repositories. Even discussions of sound archives often tend to imagine (or transcribe) sound objects as fixed texts. Drawing on a selection of multisensory objects from the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, an archive consisting primarily of materials related to 20th-century oral poetry from southeastern Europe, I consider here how many (if not most) archival objects exceed the sensory and media logics of the archive that holds them. In other words, these objects exhibit a quality of "archival excess," fitting poorly in or being elided completely from catalogs, finding aids, and other archival inventories. They function as boundary objects, marking out the margins of the archives and the classifications that exclude certain objects inhabiting the same archival space. Rethinking the archive in terms of not only the audiovisual but also touch, taste and smell offers a way to reconsider latent assumptions about what kinds of things "belong" in an archive. Such a re-evaluation also raises significant questions about what kinds of humans archives produce.
- Subjects
ARCHIVAL research; SOUND archives; AUTHOR archives; EUROPEAN folk literature; ARCHIVAL processing
- Publication
Fontes Artis Musicae, 2015, Vol 62, Issue 3, p262
- ISSN
0015-6191
- Publication type
Article