Many thanks to all the speakers and attendees who came to our ‘Institutions as Curators’ workshop, which took place last Friday and Saturday (31st March and 1st of April). It was a really productive couple of days, with a series of excellent talks from all involved that sparked a wide-ranging series of discussions about (among other things):
- How to periodise institutional developments.
- The often-occluded importance of the profit motive.
- The value of the curation metaphor.
- The importance of classification systems and the world views that they instantiate.
- How to negotiate and interpret lacunae in surviving records.
- The ways that heritage collections can best be employed in modern institutional spaces and collaborations.
- The manners in which modern technologies open up new possibilities for data-driven observations.
- How institutions deal (or fail to deal) with the deaths or retirements of key individuals who guard their values or who serve as repositories of institutional memory.
- The ways that institutions replaced the former functions of the church and the manners in which literary writers self-consciously appealed back to church-focused models of virtue.
- The manners in which literary writings have represented and attempted to regulate the affective power of institutional collections.
- The ways in which institutions deal with post-Romantic authorship, and their tendency to write their own institutionality out of the picture when representing literary greatness.
- The relationships between institutions and their users, and the latter’s (sometimes unjust) tendency to see themselves as liberating knowledge from prisons created by the former.
- The colonial systems of valuation encoded in institutions’ modes of knowledge-gathering.
- The complex and contingent manners in which individual users engage with institutional collections for particular purposes.
- The range of forms in which institutions could ideally mediate access to their collections (presenting a carefully-curated overview while providing detailed records for everything; recording full organisational histories while also creating spaces for serendipitous encounters).
- The importance of polite ideals as underpinnings for the establishment of institutions and for the regulation of their discourses.
- The move in the late eighteenth century from value systems based round the broader literary qualities of tolerance and taste to more specialised and exclusive systems of regulation: from genial collegiality to disciplined colleges.
- The legitimating function of institutions and their tendency to try and place themselves in symbiotic and regulatory relations with conservative canons and common values.
- The importance of institutions’ spaces for their self-conceptions.
- The heterogenous natures of long-running institutions’ practices, and the importance of experienced individuals for negotiating these.
- Institutions as archive-makers and archive-manipulators, inheriting, editing and reshaping traditions.
- Confidence, anxiety and legitimised dissent.
These issues and many others will require a great deal of further consideration, which they will receive both at the remaining two workshops and in a series of upcoming posts on this blog. We’ve invited all our speakers to share their thoughts both on their own presentations and on the workshop more broadly if they wish to do so. We hope to publish a series of observations over the coming weeks and months both to develop the workshop’s discussions and to provide access for those participating in our upcoming events and for academic and institutional communities more broadly. We’re open to anyone who’d like to provide their insights; please feel free to get in touch with us on institutionsofliterature@gmail.com.