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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
A Reckless Verisimilitude: The Archive In James Ellroy’S Fiction, Bradley J. Wiles
A Reckless Verisimilitude: The Archive In James Ellroy’S Fiction, Bradley J. Wiles
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
The archive as both plot element and narrative presentation factors significantly into the work of James Ellroy’s novels in the L.A. Quartet and USA Underworld Trilogy series. This article examines the important role of the archive as a source of information and evidence that Ellroy’s characters utilize in their attempts at either maintaining or attacking the status quo. Through these novels, Ellroy conveys the potential power archives wield over the trajectory of history and our understanding of it by demonstrating how the historical record is often shaped in favor of the powerful. Yet even if the archive is a manifestation …
People Of The Stacks: ‘The Archivist’ Character In Fiction, Sharon Wolff
People Of The Stacks: ‘The Archivist’ Character In Fiction, Sharon Wolff
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory
Archives and archival professionals suffer from what may be termed as an “image problem” due to their general lack of exposure to the public. With their efforts being tucked away in various repositories, their fictional representatives become an important way to give people an idea of what they do. With the help of an article by Arlene Schmuland, two works of fiction, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks from 2008 and The Archivist by Martha Cooley from 1998, are used to compare fictional archivists and the ways their differences may indicate a change in how their real-life counterparts are …