“Nation and Identification: The Archival Subject”

“Nation and Identification: The Archival Subject”

This paper is part of a project on the archival nature of national imaginings: the ways in which the idea of the nation depends upon institutions of collective memory which range from monuments and museums to literature and film.  More specifically, this section of the project focuses on the mode of identification associated with these technologies of memory, exploring critically the production of what we might call the “archival subject.”

While psychoanalytic accounts of identification and interpellation will be seen as essential tools in the analysis of the shaping of subjects that are imagined in conformity with the nation, it will also be argued that established accounts of the subject rooted in Freudian, Lacanian and Althusserian principles need to be critically re-examined from the perspective of the archive.

The paper will offer a reading of a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Ring of Thoth,” set in the Louvre, as a way of exploring the intersections between the literary and the archival in the shaping of the national subject.

Presenter: Dr. Trevor Hope, Acting Chair, Department of English Language and Literature, Yaşar University