The Plot and The Archive: Curation, Provisional Histories, and Novels

The Plot and the Archive applies museum studies and curatorial techniques to post-1960s novels dealing with history and outlines the importance of a figure called the character-as-curator within such spaces. This figure exemplifies different strategies employed to interrogate, analyze and reconcile what presents itself as a deeply problematic historical record. In so doing, this novelistic figure performs what postmodernity has tasked of scholarship as such, and curation signifies capaciously the critical techniques of identification, separation, re-arrangement and re-collection which enable the possibility of discovery and new understanding. It is no longer a worthwhile endeavor simply to characterize history as a falsehood, disregarding its offerings as corrupt, misleading, or potentially dangerous. Instead, this dissertation explores how characters create archives and curate artifacts as strategies for reconciling the past.

Each chapter in The Plot and the Archive deals with specific historical and archival challenges and uses museum studies as a lens to account for unempirical sources in historical records (e.g., memory and imagination). Chapter one situates readers in the historical and museological contexts this dissertation responds to and draws a relationship between novels and museum studies. Chapter two examines problems with relying on empirical modes for constructing histories in Don DeLillos Libra. Chapter three moves away from overarching master narratives to examine memory and familial archives in Junot Diazs The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chapter four focuses on Daphne Marlatts Ana Historic to explore how curationcoupled with imagination and memorycan provide authors and readers a language for locating womens excluded histories. By relying on literary and curatorial techniques (including ekphrasis, synecdoche, show-and-tell, and displayed archeology), this dissertation argues that characters-as-curators encourage readers to question known historical records, using textually constructed exhibition spaces as sites for these reexaminations. The Plot and the Archive augments the character-as-curators adaptability by extending museum studies to literary studies, arguing for their importance in reading literature