Ways of Representing Accumulation: The Archive and the Collection in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and John Fowles’ the Collector

• Authors: Erika Ada
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper explores the desire of accumulating in our contemporary society by analysing two processes: that of archiving and that of collecting; and how these are represented in literature, in novels such as Everything is Illuminated, which deals with the preservation of memory through the archive; and The Collector, which brings a different perspective on the act of collecting, namely, the relationship between collecting, possession and fetishism.

Keywords

EN

archive; collection; possession; tabulation; preservation

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Romanian Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 192-198

Dates

published

2013-03-01

online

2013-02-22

Contributors

author

Erika Ada

• University of Timişoara

References

• Alphen, Ernst van. 2008. “Archival Obsessions and Obsessive Archives” in What is Researchin the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter. Ed. by Michael Ann Holly, Marquard Smith. London: Yale University Press.
• Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. “The system of collecting” in The Cultures of Collecting. Ed. by John Elsner, Roger Cardinal. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Belk, Russel W. 2001. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London and New York: Routledge.
• Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Unpacking my library. A talk about book collecting” in Illuminations. Ed. by Hannah Arendt. Trans. by Harry Zohn. New York: Shoken Books.
• Enwezor, Okwui. 2008. Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument.
• Göttingen : Steidl Publishers.
• Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2002. Everything is Illuminated. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin.
• Fowles, John. The Collector [Online]. Available: http://www.2shared.com/document/ghcICu0g/The_Collector_by_John_Fowles.html [Accessed 2012, March 8].
• latin-dictionary.org. [Online]. Available: http://www.latin-dictionary.org/colligere [Accessed 2012, April 10]
• merriam-webster.com. [Online]. Available: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/archive [Accessed 2012, April 10]
• Pearce, Susan M. 1998. Collecting in Contemporary Practice. London, New Delhi: Sage Publications.
• Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, theCollection. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/rjes-2013-0017