Call for Papers. Archival Poetics: Fragmentation, Organization, Multimodality (Issue 17, 2027)

Call for Papers

Archival Poetics: Fragmentation, Organization, Multimodality

 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture  (Issue 17, 2027)

University of Lodz, Poland

Co-editors of the issue:

Wojciech Drąg, PhD (University of Wrocław)

Elin Ivansson, PhD (Sheffield Hallam University)

Despite its associations with dusty catalogues and its complicity with colonial and totalitarian control apparatuses, the archive remains a vibrant critical category. In Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (2016), Gabriella Giannachi attributes its current relevance to “our obsession with the augmentation, documentation, and transmission of our own presence” through social media and various self-tracking apps (1–2). Today, everyone with a smartphone or computer can be an archivist and follow the “age-old impulse to gather and preserve” (Chadwick 26; Manoff 386). “Archives, it seems, are everywhere,” noted Sue Breakell in 2008, “both in popular culture and academic discourse.” Indeed, over the last three decades, the concept of the archive has elicited widely cited essays by, among others, Jacques Derrida and Hal Foster. Derrida wrote about “archive fever,” Foster about the “archival impulse,” and Giannachi proposed the term “archival craze.” At the beginning of the new century, art critics announced the “archival turn”—a shift towards including photographs and documents in contemporary artistic projects. More broadly, argues Sara Callahan, the archival turn points to a widespread tendency to use the archive as “a stand-in for a range of different collections, theoretical notions, and ideas” (75).

            The word “archive” originates from the Greek noun arkheion, which referred to a place where records were kept in ancient Greece (Leavitt 176). However, as Paul J. Voss and Marta L. Werner observe, the archive no longer denotes merely “a physical site—an institutional space enclosed by protective walls” but also “an imaginative site—a conceptual space whose boundaries are forever changing” (i). When one speaks of the archive, Michael Sheringham points out, one evokes “what is generic and archetypal” about physical archives, specifically “a number of gestures, routines and operations—lumping together, singling out, rummaging, listing, counting, copying, decoding, transcribing, selecting” (47). The emphasis, therefore, is not on storing but on organizing the accumulated data—the archive is “a site of processing rather than preservation” (Chadwick and Vermeulen 4). It is a structural principle, a manner of arranging and presenting information, chronological, alphabetical, or arbitrary. Although it is associated with records of past data, critics have stressed the archive’s capacity for “mapping the everyday” and “actively produc[ing] the present and the future” (Giannachi; Chadwick and Vermeulen 1).

According to Jim Collins, “the construction of the archive is a foundational aspect of the narrative universes in a number of recent, critically esteemed literary bestsellers” such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019) (219–20). The archive has also been an important formal influence on many recent works of life writing, including Anne Carson’s Nox (2009) and Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (2024). Contemporary literature’s engagement with the archive is not only thematic but also visual and material, as these works often borrow from archival methods of organization and the aesthetics of fragmentation to construct multimodal compositions (Davis; Ivansson and Gibbons).

To capture this thematic and visual engagement with the archive in multimodal lyric poetry, Rebecca Macmillan proposes the term “archival poetics,” suggesting that visual and structural engagement with the archive “presses us to consider the contents collected and to notice the process of collection,” inviting “association between materials without the claim of complete or definite representation” (201). Similarly, Brian Davis uses the term to discuss “multimodal book archives,” an experimental genre of contemporary literature in which the narrative is constructed “through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artefacts, [and] in which the book-object is presented as a container for preserving and transmitting textual artefacts” (84–85). Furthermore, Elin Ivansson and Alison Gibbons employ a more expansive conception of archival poetics, suggesting that it “encompasses a radical evocation of archival organisation, through the inclusion of lists, inventories, storage, indexes, and methods of cataloguing” (101). Taken together, these definitions of “archival poetics” signal a range of multimodal archival practices where collecting, organizing, and curating play a structural and visual role in literary composition.

Considering the changing nature of the archive and the recent interest in the archival dimension of contemporary literature, we invite papers that consider the visual, structural, and thematic role of the archive in literary practices. We are also interested in contributions that explore how the archive functions as a metaphor for examining historical and personal trauma, as well as analyses of the scope and legacy of the archival turn. Since discussions of the archive often center on Western notions of the “modern archive,” we also appreciate global perspectives on archival poetics and practices, for example, addressing representations of the colonial power of archives or Indigenous traditions of record-keeping and memory practices.

 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• the use of documents and photographs in literary works,
• the link between archives and multimodality,
• the function of archives in digital/electronic literature,
• conceptual writing and documental poetry,
• ontological hoaxes,
• literary works that follow alphabetical structure (a glossary, an encyclopedia, a bibliography, an index),
• literary uses of lists, inventories, and catalogues,
• archival artefacts in graphic novels and comics,
• postmodernist critiques of the archive (historiographic metafiction),
• reader-oriented analyses of how archives are perceived,
• archival poetics as a creative writing practice,
• the archive and the Anthropocene,
• the digital versus analogue—archive and database aesthetics.

 

An abstract [300-500 words] should be submitted as an email attachment to: wojciech.drag@uwr.edu.pl , elin.ivansson@mail.com, and text.matters@uni.lodz.pl.

 

In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, the title of the proposal, abstract, 5 keywords, and a brief bio note.

 

Important deadlines:

Deadline for submission of the abstract: 31 January 2026

Deadline for editors’ acceptance/rejection of proposals: 7 March 2026

Deadline for submission of full articles (max. 6000 words): 7 September 2026

Deadline for peer review and final acceptance/rejection of articles: 1 December 2026

Deadline for submission of final versions of articles: 1 February 2027

 

Bibliography:

Breakell, Sue. “Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive.” Tate Papers, vol. 9, 2008, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/09/perspectives-negotiating-the-archive.

Callahan, Sara. “When the Dust Has Settled: What Was the Archival Turn, and Is It Still Turning?” Art Journal, vol. 83, no. 1, 2024, pp. 74–88.

Chadwick, Tom. The Archive Novel. 2019. KU Leiden, PhD dissertation.

Chadwick, Tom, and Pieter Vermeulen. “Literature in the New Archival Landscape.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 31, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–7.

Collins, Jim. “Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and the Archive.” The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities, edited by Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 211–27.

Davis, Brian. “Instrumentalizing the Book: Anne Carson’s Nox and Books as Archives.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 84–109.

Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995, pp. 9–63.

Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October, vol. 110, 2004, pp. 3–22.

Giannachi, Gabriella. Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday. MIT P, 2016.

Ivansson, Elin, and Alison Gibbons. “Important Artifacts and Literary Media in Archival Autofiction.” The Routledge Companion to Literary Media, edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round, and Bronwen Thomas, Routledge, 2023, pp. 99–110.

Leavitt, Arthur. “What Are Archives?” American Archivist, vol. 24, no. 2, 1961, pp. 175–78.

Macmillan, Rebecca. “The Archival Poetics of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 58, no. 2, 2017, pp. 173–203.

Manoff, Marlene. “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing the Historical Record.” Libraries and the Academy, vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 385–98.

Sheringham, Michael. “Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2005, pp. 47–53.

Voss, Paul J., and Marta L. Werner. “Toward a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 32, no. 1, 1999, pp. i–viii.