The Database as a Distressed Genre

Abstract

My interest in the topic of digital archives and, by extension, database as genre, stems from my work as a librarian at the University of Central Florida where I am responsible for processing and managing a large collection of African American memorabilia. These materials were acquired from Carol Mundy, a long-time collector of African Americana. Throughout my involvement with this project, I have had the opportunity to talk to Ms. Mundy at length about her motivation for collecting as extensively as she has. Likewise, I have had the opportunity to explore the ever-growing world of digital archives and to reflect on how future researchers might interact with the materials she has so personally curated once they are digitized and made available online. In doing so, I found myself returning time and again to Susan Stewart’s theory of the distressed genre. This concept will be discussed in more depth later in the chapter. In short, however, the theory of the distressed genres is typically applied to classic literary forms such as epics, folk, and fairy tales, all of which provide an archival function insofar as they serve, to some extent, as a cultural and historical record of a specific time and place. These genres become distressed when later generations would attempt to preserve these originally oral and ephemeral traditions in a more stable written form, such as a book. Since any act of preservation involves what Stewart refers to as a “process of separation and manipulation” that removes objects from their original context, these replicas will always be less authentic than the original.1