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Into the Labyrinth of Knowledge and Power

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Into the Labyrinth of Knowledge and Power Into the Labyrinth of Knowledge and Power The library as a gendered space in the western imaginary Sanne Koevoets PhD Dissertation Utrecht University Sanne Koevoets, 2013. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License ISBN: 978-90-393-5988-4 Into the Labyrinth of Knowledge and Power The library as a gendered space in the western imaginary In het Labyrint van Kennis en Macht De bibliotheek als gegenderde ruimte in het westerse imaginaire (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 14 juni 2013 des middags te 14.30 uur door Susanna Koevoets geboren op 12 september 1980 te Apeldoorn Promotoren: Prof. Dr. R.L. Buikema Prof. Dr. S. Slapšak Financial support for this research was partially provided by the European Union, Marie Curie Fellowship for Early Stage Training (EU Sixth Framework Programme) Librarians wield unfathomable power. With a flip of the wrist they can hide your dissertation behind piles of old Field and Stream magazines. […] Librarians rule. - The Librarian Avengers Table of contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 INTRODUCTION 5 SETTING THE SCENE FOR LIBRARY RESEARCH: RESONANCES OF LIBRARY LOSS 5 SETTING THE SCENE FOR LIBRARY RESEARCH: THE “IMAGE PROBLEM” OF THE FEMALE LIBRARIAN 11 SETTING THE SCENE FOR LIBRARY RESEARCH: INTO THE LABYRINTH 18 1. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURAL LIBRARY RESEARCH 22 ARCHIVE THEORY 22 ARCHIVAL EXCLUSION AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC ERASURE 30 EPISTEMOLOGIES OF THE LIBRARY 34 A FEMINIST HETEROTOPOLOGY OF THE LIBRARY 38 METHODOLOGY: TOWARDS A POETICS OF THE LIBRARY 43 2. THE LEGACY OF ALEXANDRIA: THE LIBRARY AS MYTH 49 ALEXANDRIA AS A RETROSPECTIVE UTOPIA 51 THE GREAT LIBRARY IN LITERATURE 66 RESONANCES OF LOSS 76 THE QUEST FOR THE SECRET 95 UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN VISIONS OF THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE 103 ALEXANDRIA REBUILT? 118 3. LIBRARY TERROR: GOTHIC ENGINEERING IN THE UNCANNY LABYRINTH 120 READING THE UNCANNY LIBRARY: THE GOTHIC AS MODE AND AS CODE 124 THE EXCESSES AND TRANSGRESSIONS OF THE LIBRARY OF BABEL 129 THE LIBRARY OF BABEL: A TOMB AND A WOMB 136 THE NAME OF THE ROSE AND THE LIMITS OF MEANING 142 THE LIBRARIAN AS MONSTROUS REFLECTION 159 ROBOT LIBRARIANS ON THE UNCANNY NET 169 LOST IN THE LABYRINTH OF MEANING 180 4. BOOKS AND BODIES: DEATH, PLEASURE AND FIRE 182 DOCILE BODIES: LIBRARY DISCIPLINE 184 THE PATHOLOGY OF THE LIBRARY 196 GIRLS WHO LOVE BOOKS 207 ALEXANDRIA AND GOOGLE: A POETICS OF DESTRUCTION 219 THE POLITICS OF THE LIBRARY IN A VIRTUAL SPHERE: 229 NEW FIGURATIONS OF LIBRARIANSHIP 229 LIBRARY POLITICS 239 CONCLUSION 240 CONVENTIONS IN LIBRARY NARRATIVES: THREE PARADOXES 240 LIBRARIANSHIP AS FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE PRACTICE 246 WORKS CITED: 248 1 SUMMARY: 263 INTO THE LABYRINTH OF POWER AND KNOWLEDGE: THE LIBRARY AS A GENDERED SPACE IN THE WESTERN IMAGINARY 263 NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING 265 IN HET LABYRINTH VAN KENNIS EN MACHT: DE BLIOTHEEK ALS GEGENDERDE RIMTE IN HET WESTERSE IMAGINAIRE 265 BIOGRAPHY 267 2 Acknowledgements I entered into the labyrinth of the library expecting that it would provide me with answers to the questions that had haunted me throughout my life. I believed that somewhere I would find a book that, once located, would tell me how to be a woman, a feminist, and a scholar. I want to express my deepest gratitude to those who helped me when I inevitably got lost. First of all my gratitude goes out to the many different organizations and institutions that made this project possible: the EU Marie Curie fifth framework program for funding the first two years of my research in Ljubljana; the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) at Utrecht University for funding years 2-5 and providing me with such a supportive research environment, where I was surrounded by experts; the Nederlandse Onderzoeksschool Genderstudies (NOG) for providing an exciting and lively gender research environment in The Netherlands, and ATGender for doing the same in Europe and for making it possible to edit and write a book on this topic which is so dear to me and so sorely lacking in European studies of gender. Rosemarie Buikema, my greatest gratitude goes out to you, without whom I would have never made it out of this labyrinth at all. Thank you for tossing me a ball of yarn when I was stuck in some corner, and for helping me to draw maps of where I had been. And most of all: thank you for your patience. I also want to thank Svetlana Slapšak, without whom I would never have been able to conceive of this topic. Thank you for inviting me and encouraging me to enter this labyrinth, and for sharing with me your own labyrinth of knowledge. My trip through the labyrinth would have been very dark and lonely if I had not had a group of travel companions by my side. Thank you, dear colleagues and fellow PhD students at the department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University, for your insights, guidance, critical perspective, and encouragement throughout the years. You have been great guides. I particularly want to thank Marianne van den Boomen. Our inspiring conversations have meant a lot, and I am sure you will find some of what we have discussed on these pages. Also Koen Leurs, Chiara Bonfiglioli and Domitila Olivieri for thinking along with me about libraries, digital culture and representation. And special thanks go out to Trude Oorschot, who navigated me through the maze of formalities – you are the one with the map and the key! Anyone who has watched an adventure flick or two knows that the best part of any adventure is coming home. Erika & Jane, Pum, Rebecca, Consuelo, Sebastian, Petj & Agnes, Martine, Buïnus, Reinhard and Jeroen: you are the best housemates, neighbors and randomly appearing and disappearing riff-raff! Thank you for making our castle a real home. Fabian, Jeremy, Maartje, Maaike, Mazal, Mijke – thank you for your enduring support and for your endless patience for hearing me ramble on about libraries and feminism. And especially Delilah: thank you for meticulously going through my work and correcting my mistakes. To my mother and father: Thank you for all of your warm encouragements, for stimulating my curiosity and for supporting my not always practical decisions. And thank you for your patience when at times I was too busy or too obsessed to appreciate everything that you have done for me. 3 Dear Daan, thank you so much for standing by me, for telling me over and over that everything would be fine; for not judging me when I didn’t move from the desk for five days straight; for being there with me throughout the process, and for being you. Now that the monster at the heart of the labyrinth has been slain we can go on adventures together. 4 Introduction Setting the scene for library research: Resonances of Library Loss Research on the library as a cultural institution has been developed of late out of three distinct fields or disciplines: historical research that focuses on great libraries of the past and the historical development of libraries1; studies focusing on the cultural role of libraries2 (for instance from the fields of American studies and cultural studies); and investigations of the qualitative transformation libraries have undergone and are undergoing under the influence of changing social and technological demands.3 In the past decade, historical researchers have taken a particular interest in lost libraries, and have reflected on the effects of the destruction of great book collections through malevolence, natural disaster or neglect. The images of the burning Library of Alexandria, the flooding of the libraries of Florence, the bombing of the Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, and the looting of the National Library and Archives in Baghdad in 2003 have inspired historical and political narratives of culpability, victimization, and irreparable cultural loss. The trope of library loss is echoed time and time again in literary fiction and in popular cinema: in Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1984) the fictional Aedificium is burned to the ground, together with its priceless collection of rare volumes. In Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) books are banned, and private collections ruthlessly incinerated. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) the 1 See for instance Michael H. Harris’ History of Libraries in the Western World, the fourth edition of which was printed in 1999 (Scarecrow Press). The volume offers a descriptive account of the development of books and libraries in western history, and the latest edition also takes into account the “information revolution” of the post- WWII era and European post-socialism. Also of note are Luciano Canfora’s The Vanished Library (1990) and the collection of historical accounts of library destruction from ancient to contemporary societies in James Raven’s Lost Libraries (2004). 2 See for instance Thomas Augst and Wayne Wiegand (ed.): Libraries as Agencies of Culture (2001). This special issue of the journal American Studies which investigates libraries as “institutional locales of culture [in the United States] where communities broker the tensions between the individual and community, the public and the private, the material and the symbolic” (Augst, 2001 5). 3 See for instance Lorcan Dempsey, “Scientific, Industrial and Cultural Heritage: A Shared Approach” (2000), Thomas Kirchoff et al., “Archives, libraries, museums and the spell of ubiquitous knowledge” (2008), and Hellen Niegaard, “Library Space and Digital Challenges” (2011). 5 historical and cultural record is purged through the burning of archival materials in a furnace.
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