Bibliographical Utopianism

On Thursday, April 13, we visited SJSU Special Collections for a tour of the space and the operation of the camera scanner that we will be using to photograph some pages of Bleak House. As we work towards our final project of a digital exhibit and formulating an argument based on the material text and archival sources, we run up against this idea of Jacques Derrida's mal d'archive (see my article, "Archive Download Archive

"), the desire to include everything. In a slightly more optimistic vein, Dr. Jim Mussell calls this "bibliographical utopianism" in his Michael Wolff Lecture Links to an external site.. In our final digital exhibit project, we will work through many issues of creating a multi-modal argument through the material text, archival materials, photographic representations, and then politicized digital spaces. Before we begin, we need to ruminate on these ideas.

For this post, summarize Mussell's idea of "bibliographical utopianism" and compare it to the concept (and failures) of the "archive" represented in Harris' article.
Links to an external site.

Word count: 600-900

Formal voice