The Year's Work in the Oddball Archive

Jonathan P. Eburne is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Penn State. He is the author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Judith Roof is William Shakespeare Chair of English at Rice University and author of many books on feminism and contemporary culture.

Box I: Saving America: Archival Proliferations. Includes:
1. Joseph Campana and Tedd Bale, "Pawning, Picking, Storing, Hoarding: Archiving America on Reality Television."
An examination of the massive reality television fixation on picking, storing, pawning, and hoarding.
2. Atia Sattar, "Germ Wars: Dirty Hands, Drinking Lips and Dixie Cups"
A discussion of germs, gender, and the Dixie Cup Archive.
3. Beth McCoy, "The Archive of the Archive of the Archive: The FEMA Signs of Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Vévé of Vodoun."
A comparison of Veve and FEMA markings in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Box II: Collective Figures. Includes:
4. Robin Blyn, "Marcuse's Unreason: The Biology of Revolution"
Rereading Marcuse's odd positioning in the world of political philosophy.
5. Dennis Allen, "The Madness of Slavoj Žižek."
Ponders the ubiquity of Slavoj Žižek.
6. Jonathan P. Eburne, "Fish Kit."
A look at David Lynch's extra-cinematic art of assemblage and dissection.
Box III: Untimely Archives. Includes:
7. Timothy Sweet, "The Eighteenth-Century Archives du Monde: The Question of Agency in Extinction Stories"
Considers Native American and Colonial theories for the extinction of dinosaurs.
8. Charles Tung, "Modernist Heterochrony, Evolutionary Biology, and the Chimera of Time."
How bodies, genes, and H.G. Wells play with heterochronies.
9. Aaron Jaffe, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER: Information at the Literary Limit."
What happens when the archive has too much and not enough.
Box IV: Archives Acting Out. Includes:
10. Judith Roof, "Personifying La Con, or Post-Hoax Ergo Proper Hoax"
Anatomizes hoaxes and their dependence on an archive.
11. Grant Aubrey Farred, "The Eleventh Commandment."
Being revolutionary with Thomas Paine and Saint Paul.
12. Seth Morton, "The Archive that Knew Too Little: The International Necronautical Society and the Avant-Garde."
What happens when the INS plays with itself.
Archival Supplement: Afterword. Includes:
David L. Martin, "The Oddball Archive: Politics, Performance, Agency"
A retrospective.