Archive Fever: Literature, Illegibility, and Historical Method

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores the allure of illegibility in the archive. The author adapts methods from literary analysis and visual art in order to decipher an inscrutable fragment from the archive of Greek Egyptian novelist Stratis Tsirkas (1911–1980): a hastily written something on a 1929 film flyer advertising the screening of two Hollywood movies at the Ciné de Paris theater in Cairo. In her attempt to render the text legible, the author reconstructs the moment of the archival fragment’s production by developing a technique called “reverse calligraphy.” This sensory engagement with the archive’s materiality leads to a series of illuminations both with regard to Tsirkas’s biography and with regard to the role of creativity in historical inquiry.