Welcome to our class blog! Feel free to make yourself at home. This will be an archive of all of your wonderful, smart work during the semester.
For this first post:
After reading Derrida’s Archive Fever, discuss, in your own words, what Derrida means by “archive.” Because this is a complex text, look up words and concepts you don’t know, and begin to forge some kind of meaning out of what you read. There is no right anwer. Instead, you will notice that you will begin to understand the text as you go back through it to write about it. You might consider how “the picture not taken” [discussed in class] might relate to it? What does this say about past and future? Or what it means to alter the archive, memory, knowledge? Once you’ve done that sufficiently and thoughtfully, discuss what technology has done to the archive, both according to Derrida and using your own observations. You could refer to the art exhibit, Archive Fever, or “How Documentary Became the Most Exciting Kind of Filmmaking” reading and/or Misty Keasler’s picture not taken.
For these posts, don’t be afraid to make them your own; be creative and artful in your response. Use craft, but also be self-reflective. SAY NO TO CLICHES! And please stay very close to the text for this first post. Do close reading and thoughtful writing as a way of opening up the prompt above. I look forward to reading!
dr. c
Remember | Blog post requirements:
Critical Blog Posts:
1) Should engage with the text
2) Refer to specific examples from the text under examination.
3) Pose at least one question for class discussion.
4) Be a minimum of 300 words.
5) Include a descriptive title and relevant tags for navigation and indexing.
6) Must be proofread and spell-checked.
Writing for the Web: The Art of Missing Information 
After reading Derrida’s Archive Fever, I can only come to the conclusion that by speaking of “archive” he may mean the overall crossover between nature and history. Two words that he frequently repeats throughout the beginning of the article. But what he actually means by nature and history still have so many meanings behind them. Derrida begins to elaborate on the fact that many things have change throughout history and with the natural world so how much of the “archives” can be true or believed. “One has trouble, and for essential reasons, establishing it and interpreting it in the document it delivers to us, here in the word which names it, that is the “archive”. (Derrida, page 9) In this statement from Derrida, he reveals th trouble with actually delivering the “archive: aspect into a document which connects with our in class discussion of a moment undocumented. There are many moments whether they be historical or not is not easy enough to just archive in a document, you must be in the moment to under stand all aspects of it. Derrida also bgins to discuss how technology relates to what we archive in these times. How tchnology has such a huge impact not only what we archive but how we archive it. Derrida begins to implicate Freud’s aspects of “archive” and how it is simply gathering information. If this were so, how much of these so called “archives can be completly accurate to what we know and what we do not know? Derrida egins to question this in his text or simply make the reader question this aspect as they are reading. What can we actually believe is the truth if a archive is not perfect and can never be so. We must know what we are archiving today for those tomorrow.
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