Over the past few years, I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about storytellers and storytelling. In fact, it was my interest in the work of the Polish author Joseph Conrad, who’s Marlow is arguably one of the most widely recognized storytelling characters in twentieth-century literature, which started me on the path that eventually led to my involvement with the Foreign Literatures in America project. I’ve enjoyed reading the blog posts of my fellow FLA team members as they have offered some exciting paradigms for thinking about what we are attempting to accomplish and how we might proceed. Peter Mallios, our project leader, inspiringly compared our work to that of maritime adventurers; Rebecca Borden, my colleague from the Modern British collection, invoked the notion that our project should enable users to perform historical investigations on the microscopic level in her engaging post on “Searching for the Quantum Dimensions of Foreign Literature.” As I reflect on what we have done so far, I would like to add yet another paradigm of comparison for thinking about our work designing a digital archive to trace the reception of foreign authors in America. As over the past several months, the FLA team has met on numerous occasions to discuss the parameters of this archive, I have increasingly become convinced of two points: 1) as digital archivists, we are storytellers of a sorts; and 2) it is fundamentally important to the efficacy of our project that we acknowledge ourselves as such.
Now, to be clear, I don’t mean that we are “storytellers” in terms of providing a traditional kind of narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end; but rather I am thinking of the ways that the decisions we make provide an interpretive framework through which our primary documents will be viewed and potentially understood by users. How will we organize the presentation of the reception materials we have collected? Should they be organized by genre (review, advertisement, letter to the editor, etc.)? By journal? By author? By author’s nationality? Or should we create an interface that allows the user a choice between these arrangements? How will we make the materials searchable? Will we use keywords, and what keywords will we identify? Will we annotate the materials, and what will we annotate? What kind of contextual information will we provide? Decisions such as these must be made so that our site can be useable; yet they will inevitably affect how the materials we offer are read. Moreover, much like a literary canon, an archive itself creates a kind of narrative by virtue of the materials the archivist chooses to include or leave out. Over the past few months we have discussed questions such as what authors we should focus on first and whether we want to proceed by looking at their reception in a specific journal or in multiple journals across a given time period.
This all goes to my point in claiming the necessity of consciously thinking of ourselves and acknowledging our function as storytellers presenting the primary materials of the FLA collection in a particular manner. There is great power in a skilled storyteller’s ability to communicate and to open a listener’s mind to new experiences and perspectives. Indeed, part of the value of the “story” the FLA project offers – that is the “story” of the fundamental significance of foreign literature to American identity – comes from the fact that it is a previously unrecognized narrative. For this very reason, however, we must proceed cautiously and self-reflectively, making as much as possible our intentions and process clear and accessible to users. This means documenting and explaining why we have made particular editorial and organizational decisions. I also think that acknowledging ourselves as storytellers makes the inclusion of some kind of a platform for user input – a platform through which users can post comments, questions, critiques, additional materials, and potentially their own discoveries and research – all the more important. For, in the end, it doesn’t seem to me that the “story” of foreign literatures in America is one that we can, or want, to tell on our own. It’s a collaborative story, one that we hope to see grow from the resources we make available.
Jennifer Wellman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Maryland English Department. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios.