Devin Fore
Assistant Professor
Department of German, Princeton University
On leave 2008-2009:
The American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17-19
14109 Berlin Germany
Devin Fore is an assistant professor in the German department at
Princeton University, where he is also an associate faculty member of
the Slavic Department and an affiliated faculty member of the program
in Media + Modernity. He is currently a fellow at the American Academy
in Berlin and is pursuing an interdisciplinary project that explores
the filiations between Soviet and Weimar Modernism. Components of this
research, which focuses on the material and technological culture of
the interwar period, have appeared in the journals October, New German
Critique, and Grey Room.
“To Be Continued': On Documentary Bibliographies”
Max Eastman opened his 1934 book Artists in Uniform. A Study of
Literature and Bureaucratism with a lengthy quotation from Sergei
Tret’iakov’s essay “To Be Continued.” The
appearance in Eastman’s book of Tret’iakov’s text,
which had served as a précis of the Soviet factography movement,
reveals a latent bureaucratizing agenda at work within the documentary
avant-garde. To clarify the logic of the kinship between documentation
and administration, this paper focuses on archival transcripts from the
1934 All-Union Congress on the Artistic Ocherk, a lesser, now
forgotten, plenary organized by the factographers on the eve of the
legendary All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. The first order of the
day at this congress was to establish a bibliography for a type of
literary production, ocherkizm, that had always lacked clear generic
contours. The recurrent obsession at the congress with the problem of
how to classify documentary work reveals not just the anxiety of the
participants about what exactly defined their own work vis-à-vis
established genres such as the novel or the poem; their will to
taxonomize also reflected the practical and justifiable concern with
the problem of what to do with all of that work. After these ephemeral
ocherki, or sketches, had been published in journals and newspapers,
what was to become of them? In answer to this question, my paper draws
from two theoretical works that attempt to reckon with the
interminability and constitutive openness of documentary production:
Traité de documentation. Le livre sur le livre (1934) by Paul
Otlet, the Belgian founder of the card catalog, and The writer and the
book. An essay in textology (1928) by the Formalist Boris Tomashevskii.
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