BCLA 'Archive' Conference, 5-8 July 2010
[...] the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.
Every three years the British Comparative Literature Association holds a major international conference on a topic relevant to a range of disciplines. The theme of the 2010 conference was: Archive. The aim of the conference was to encourage critical engagements with this theme in a wide variety of ways, including: archiving the future, bibliomania, censored archives, collecting, conservation, drafts, fake archives, film and sound archives, imaginary archives, libraries, literary remains, lost archives, manuscripts, marginalia, politics of the archive, oral history, secrets of the archive, technologies of the archive, testimony, and the unarchived.
Our plenary speakers - academics, directors of major archives, and a creative writer - were chosen to offer a range of perspectives on the idea of the archive:
- Richard Price (Head of Modern British Collections, British Library)
- Ulrich Raulff (Director of the German Literature Archive, Marbach)
- Max Saunders (Professor of English, King’s College, London)
- Michael Sheringham (Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford)
- Carolyn Steedman (Professor of History, University of Warwick)
- Dubravka Ugresic (Writer)
This conference was organized at the University of Kent on behalf of the British Comparative Literature Association by Prof. Shane Weller (Comparative Literature) and Dr Ben Hutchinson (German), co-directors of the Centre for Modern European Literature.