Foreword for Reading the Archival Revolution

Foreword

Paul A. Kottman, Series Editor

Like most of us who teach literature for a living, Cristina Vatulescu is keenly aware that we seem to be living through the end of an era—an era that could be described as “peak literacy.” The historical period that extended from the time of Gutenberg until the advent of television, or perhaps the internet, saw an unprecedented rise in reading. In that historical period, the sheer number of readers and of things to be read increased exponentially.

Nowadays, as Vatulescu notes, the culture of new media makes reading—at least, of that historically formed sort—an increasingly rare way to spend one’s time. This might simply be a way of saying, not that reading no longer occurs, but that we now largely ask machines to do the reading for us. “Reading is a key tool in Big Brother’s repertoire,” as Vatulescu puts it. At any rate, without question the sheer quantity of things to be read now far exceeds any person’s—or, for that matter, any culture’s—capacity to “keep up” with the sheer historical-archival accumulation. As Vatulescu notes, we are living through what is often called an “archival revolution” or an “archival turn.”

Faced with these facts, many readers nowadays find that “keeping up” with reading means keeping track of what is circulating in the obdurate present: newspapers, social media feeds, whatever the current “conversation” seems to be. In other words, reading now appears parasitic on, or reflective of, the current moment in time. As with other forms of criticism (or “hot takes”) that deal with whatever has just dropped into view—movie or book reviews, journalism, polemics, breathless gossip, posts by trendsetting influencers—readers and publishers increasingly organize their activity around whatever the turning of the seasons brings. If so, then reading no longer functions to safeguard historical tradition, but only as another mode of “monitoring” (as the philosopher Stanley Cavell once described television-watching) whatever is going on in the present.

All this stands in tension, of course, with the age-old traditions of literary criticism that continue to shape practices of reading. Even before modern literature departments existed, the work of interpretation and the development of hermeneutic methods focused readers’ attention on the meanings that lay hidden in, say, the Holy Bible. In this tradition, the assumption is (or was) that meanings lie dormant in texts that come down from the past, and that these meanings are somehow important enough to need uncovering in the present—compelling literary critics to constantly ask what texts from the past mean and how they mean. The textual transmission of meaning and new modes of interpretation go together to form “literary criticism” in its highest vocation.

A great virtue of Reading the Archival Revolution is that it faces up, unflinchingly, to this collision of literary criticism with the archival revolution. Throughout Vatulescu draws on traditional tools of literary critics as well as recent works of scholars for whom archives—especially archives that evidence massive forms of historical domination of one group of people by another—pose the paradigmatic ethical challenge to contemporary reading practices. Moreover, she raises the stakes by taking as her case study “the most dramatic archival revolution of the twentieth century”: the opening of miles of classified archives following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Her first-order question is: what can reading do when faced with these documents?

Vatulescu’s scholarship and fluency make her approach to this archive worthy of attention, and her book is an important contribution to the efforts of historians and literary scholars to untangle what happened and is still happening in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. But she also offers a more general set of reflections on what reading itself is called to do in the face of the archival turn. Vatulescu sees the declassification of Stasi and Eastern Bloc archives as an impetus to rethink literary criticism itself.

The declassification of secret police archives blasts a hole in our stubborn attention to the present. These archives insistently press the demands of the past upon readers in ways unanticipated by historical traditions of textual transmission but which, nevertheless, Vatulescu claims, do not leave us “helpless.” If the aims of traditional literary criticism have been to uncover meaning, then the demands of archives now echo as a plea for justice. At issue is whether we as readers are up to the task of responding humanely to Big Brother’s voracious appetite for things to read about us.