The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive

448 Pages·2017·30.04 MB·English

by  Jonathan P. Eburne

T HE
Y E A R’S W ORK
IN T HE
ODDB A L L A RCHI V E
THE YEAR’S WORK: STUDIES IN FAN
CULTURE AND CULTURAL THEORY
EDWARD P. COMENTALE AND AARON JAFFE, EDITORS
The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies
Edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron
Jaffe, Endnote by William Preston Robertson
The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center
Edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe
EDITED BY
JONATHAN P. EBURNE
AND JUDITH ROOF
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THE ODDBALL ARCHIVE
Title Page
Collection Summary
Scope and Contents
History of the Collection
Organizational Note
Access
Acknowledgments
COLLEC TION SUMMARY
TITLE The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive
SPAN DATES ca. 1737–2013
CALL NO. 978-0-253-01847-2
CREATORS Eburne, Jonathan P. (Editor) and Roof, Judith (Editor)
EXTENT 14 items; 4 boxes; 448 p.; 6.125 x 7 in.
LANGUAGE Collection material in English
LOCATION Indiana University Press
SUMMARY A collection of documents addressing topics
from the sidebars of mainstream thought and culture;
includes essays and brief interventions on topics ranging
from fossils to Dixie cups. Contains illustrations.
FINDING AID PERMALINK Cite or bookmark
this finding aid as: iupress.indiana.edu
PERMALINK ONLINE Catalog record for this collection:
iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807762
SCOPE AND CONTENTS
· Box I. Saving America: Archival Proliferations · 1
1 Joseph Campana and Theodore Bale · “Pawning, Picking, Storing,
Hoarding: Archiving America on Reality Television” · 8
An examination of the massive reality television fixation
on picking, storing, pawning, and hoarding.
2 Atia Sattar · “Germ Wars: Dirty Hands,
Drinking Lips, and Dixie Cups” · 46
A discussion of germs, gender, and the Dixie cup archive.
3 Beth A. McCoy · “The Archive of the Archive of
the Archive: The FEMA Signs of Post-Katrina New
Orleans and the Vévés of Vodoun” · 82
A comparison of vévés and FEMA signs in post-Katrina New Orleans.
· Box II. Collective Figures · 115
4 Robin Blyn · “Marcuse’s Unreason: The Biology of Revolution” · 123
Rereading Marcuse’s odd positioning in the
world of political philosophy.
5 Dennis Allen · “The Madness of Slavoj Žižek” · 150
Ponders the ubiquity of Žižek.
6 Jonathan P. Eburne · “Fish Kit” · 178
A look at David Lynch’s extracinematic art
of assemblage and dissection.
· Box III. Untimely Archives · 213
7 Timothy Sweet · “The Eighteenth-Century Archives du monde:
The Question of Agency in Extinction Stories” · 219
Considers Native American and Colonial
theories for the extinction of dinosaurs.
8 Charles M. Tung · “Modernist Heterochrony,
Evolutionary Biology, and the Chimera of Time” · 246
How bodies, genes, and H. G. Wells play with heterochronies.
9 Aaron Jaffe · “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA
FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER: Inhumanism
at the Literary Limit” · 279
What happens when the archive has too much and not enough.
· Box IV. Archives Acting Out · 307
10 Judith Roof · “Personifying La Con,
or Post Hoax, Ergo Proper Hoax” · 313
Anatomizes hoaxes and their dependence on an archive.
11 Grant Farred · “The Eleventh Commandment” · 336
Being revolutionary with Thomas Paine and Saint Paul.
12 Seth Morton · “The Archive That Knew Too Little: The
International Necronautical Society and the Avant-Garde” · 364
What happens when the INS plays with itself.
· Afterword · David L. Martin · “‘To Prophesy post hoc’:
The Curious Afterlives of Oddball Archives” · 391
· Index · 409
HISTORY OF THE COLLEC TION
The Oddball Archive
The Oddball Archive is a collection whose full range we are only beginning
to explore. Culled from the sidebars of mainstream culture and thought, its
holdings document the eccentricities of culture, thought, and archivization
alike. There exists a nearly infinite expanse of such material: anomaly, after
all, is the perpetual yield of any system. The history of cultural production
is replete with abandoned prototypes, rejected models, crackpot theories,
and antiquated media; the permutations are endless. We all too often dis-
count the value of this material, however. Though it may be limitless in
scope, its idiosyncrasy makes it difficult to take seriously. Subtending what
we think of as the legitimate archive of cultural achievement, such oddball
material appears as the trivial, the illogical, the irreverent, the irrelevant,
the misled. It is the nutty by-product, we might say, of the procedures that
distinguish the true from the false, the major from the minor, or the model
from the shards.
The modern age is no stranger to such material. The history of ideas
is replete with connoisseurs of the cabinet of curiosities and the loose col-
lection of odds and ends. Medieval church reliquaries and Renaissance
collections of natural curiosities gave rise to the taxonomic imperatives
of the Encyclopédistes and other scientific catalogers of the known world.
During the Enlightenment, the Wunderkammer gave way to the museum.
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