Archives, authority, aura: modernism’s archival turn

The modernist scholar increasingly engages in work in the archive. Yet, as much as it is a place of work, it seems also to function domestically, as Jacques Derrida remarks: the archive is "house, a domicile, an address" (2). An address for what? Janine Utell argues the archive is "the resting place of the authority of the author, […] the site of origins, order, stability, history" (53-54). At the same time as archives are sites of satisfyingly solid physical slog and of a stabilizing foundation in materiality, they also seem to prompt dream-work. Part of the enchantment of the archive emerges from its multiple narrative possibilities, as Alice Yaegar Kaplan suggests: will the researcher find herself in an epic, a gumshoe novel, or an adventure story? The mixed generic qualities of archive work "cross over, multiply, intertwine," says Kaplan (102). As a result, archive work proffers complex and multiple affective responses and possesses, as Philip Larkin once stated, a "magical value." (99)