Publisher's Synopsis
What drives the collector? Is the archive a site of order, the convergence of past narratives and present desires, the chaotic reflection of passions spilling over categories? Is every lover an archive waiting to come undone? Every archive a place where the dust of bodies accumulates? One file in a fond of misplaced manuscripts, [Case Studies] is haunted by an author's compulsion to repeat and the archive's inevitable limits. A finding aid guides the reader through a field of drafts, grids and marginalia, but can it account for this conflicting narrative of desire and its inevitable unraveling? A book-length disentanglement of one archive of emotion, [Case Studies] dwells in the eerily familiar, exposing the fragility of our most rigid constraints.
