Carolyn SteedmanCritiques

Steedman's book really challenges histories of working class folks by taking her own life and her mother's life and tracing them with some lenses of psychoanalysis and also readings of class consciousness and showing how disconnected those experiences are from dominant narratives about working class life. It sort of feels all over the place, but every part of it reads towards her argument and it's really compelling in the ways she mines her own experience for these pieces. I can't quite explain it, but I found it to be a really interesting, compelling read and I definitely recommend it.

I found this book to be unpleasant and unsuccessful. As scholarship, the bitterness of the author compromised the presentation, while as memoir the erudition interfered with the life story.½

I'm not a historian, and thus not the target audience, and hence this review is highly subjective. I felt that most of the essays in this book revolved around literary-theory-type ramblings, only rarely getting to the bone of the matter. It is not a work focussing on the archive as such, I'd rather say it is about the process of writing history and what history-writing is and means and what historians say and should be saying. The primary focus, I guess, is on the development of historiography from the nineteenth century, and what insights can be gleaned by returning to those 19C historians. I didn't find this particularly useful, but others undoubtedly will.½

At once a biography of her mother, an autobiography, and a philosophical study of gender and class, Landscape for a Good Woman is a beautiful exposition of the intersections of class and patriarchy in 1950s Britain through one woman's life.

Nothing like reading a bunch of children’s books and then delving into deconstructionism and a response to the writings of Derrida on archives. Or Freud. Or whatever it is that Derrida writes about, because I haven’t read Archive Fever yet myself, and it will be a challenge to understand it when I do. As Honor warned in LIS 438, “It will melt your brain!”

As best I can summarize, Dust is about:

Chap. 1 – “In the archon’s house” – a response to Derrida and an attempt to define what is the Archive Fever.

Chap. 2 – “‘Something she called a fever’: Michelet, Derrida and dust” – More on fever, both the feeling of the historian deeply involved in learning from the material and the archive, and true fever, the occupational hazard of the researcher breathing in dust in the archive. A lot about anthrax in this chapter as well as the introduction to the French historian Michelet.

Chap. 3 – “The magistrates” – Case studies of how the poor and powerless appear in English legal records, and whether or not the historian really brings these people to life when studying these records.

“… the archive that is the real Archive in ‘Archive Fever in not and never has been the repository of official documents alone. And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.” (p. 45)

Chap. 4 – “The space of memory: in an archive” – Reflections on the Clio the Muse, and the concept of History as a process rather than a thing.

“But in the actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is human memory; and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away that is the unconscious. The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there … And nothing happens to this stuff, in the Archive. It is indexed, it is catalogued, and some of it is lost. But as stuff, it just sits there until it is read, and used, and narrativesed. In the Archive, you cannot be shocked at its exclusions, its emptinesses, at what is not catalogued … Its condition of being deflects outrage: in its quiet folders and bundles is the neatest demonstration of how state power has operated, through ledgers and lists and indictments, and through what is missing from them.” (p. 68)

Chap. 5 – “To Middlemarch: without benefit of archive” – Uses George Eliot as an example of historical novel and how history is created in narrative form.

Chap. 6 – “What a rag rug means” – The symbol of the rag rug of the working class experience and what its absence means in the exploration of places, absent of people. The “novel that is crafted is taken and remade out of other people’s stories,” is like the rag rug in that it represents a history created not actual.

Chap. 7 – “About ends: on how the end is different from an ending” – The chapter title sums up well that this chapter is about the difference between ends and endings, and that the Archive only has the latter.

“So there is a double nothingness in the writing of history and in the analysis of it: it is about something that never did happen in the way it comes to be represented (the happening exists in the telling or the text); and it is made out of materials that aren’t there, in an archive or anywhere else. We should be entirely unsurprised that deconstruction made no difference to this kind of writing. The search for the historian’s nostalgia for origins and original referents cannot be performed, because there is actually nothing there: she is not looking for anything: only silence, the space shaped by what once was; and now is no more.” (p. 154)

Chap. 8 – “The story of dust” – Dust, so many meaning, to clean? To pollute? The remains? What is gone? What will never cease? What is always there? Dirt? Good or bad? Useful? “Dust studies” indeed.