Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives

摘要

Susan Howe describes Spontaneous Particulars as a 'swan song' (p. 9). Originally conceived as an illustrated slide-show lecture, the beautiful colour images and text brought together in this slim volume form a tribute to the pleasures of working with literary manuscripts and ephemera, pleasures she fears may be diminished as new technologies transform how we engage with such artefacts. 'We need to see and touch objects and documents,' she writes, 'now we often merely view the same material on a computer screen - digitally, virtually, etc.' (p. 9). Howe opens with the indisputable proposition that 'the nature of archival research is in flux'. Although she does not elaborate explicitly on the implications of such flux, this idea nevertheless frames her creative homage to the 'material details' (p. 21) or 'historical-existential traces' (p. 24) that for her make an archive an archive. They are also the qualities of the archival experience that inspire her work as a poet and as a remarkable literary critic.