Fictive Museums and the Poetics of Mislabelling

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Notes

¹ The South Shetlands (an Antarctic territory) are not to be confused with the Shetland Islands of Great Britain, where Affey, like many of the brave men of the whaling industry, was born.

² The appearance of near-identical forms in unrelated organisms is a familiar mystery to biologists, who term the process ‘convergent evolution’, and the structures ‘analogous’.

³ It is clear from this section that Malinowski believes this ‘giant fish’ to be a mythical creature. In an earlier section, Malinowski likewise consigns reports of a native encounter with a giant squid to the realm of fantasy, as many such accounts from seafarers have been throughout history.

⁴ These conceptual spaces are currently being explored by a branch of literary theory known as ‘cognitive poetics’, particularly the work building on Paul Werth's Text World Theory (see Stockwell 2007; Gavins 2007). But just as Derrida's much misquoted line ‘there is no outside-text’ observes that texts have no outside, it is vital to note there is no ‘within’ a text either (Derrida 1997, 163). This is a metaphor. Our models of reading and thinking are so bound with conventionalized spatial metaphors that it is tricky not to reify concepts of interiority and depth in hermeneutics and epistemology, and to root our analyses upon them.

⁵ A small sample of the books on this subject published in the last few years include Williams and Tsien's Wunderkammer (2013), Davenne and Fleurent's Cabinets of Wonder (2012), Mauriès’ Cabinets of Curiosities (2011) and Burda's The Digital Wunderkammer (2011).

⁶ An ‘armarium’ is a type of cabinet. While the word is derived from the Latin arma, meaning ‘weapons’ or ‘tools’, the word was used widely during the Middle Ages to describe chests and cupboards for storing food, money, books or clothing, and remains in use in the Catholic Church, naming the cabinet where vestments are kept.