Bernth Lindfors’s archive fever

Abstract

Bernth Lindfors recently sent me a manuscript on Don Herdeck, which signals an active post-retirement research career. Herdeck famously published and promoted African literature for almost three decades in the United States. The biography of authors and figures such as Herdeck that constitute Lindfors’s forte is the more exciting aspect of the cold hard facts he spent his entire career investigating. Of what relevance is the material history of writing to the study of literature? This is precisely the question for Lindfors, an ardent researcher who argues that a literary scholarship has no claim to knowledge or a disciplinary field without biography and archival research. Is it accurate to assume that empirical data offer the best explanation and indubitable expression of knowledge? How should archives function in literary scholarship? How do empirical data and reliance on archival research condition our understanding of texts or define and delimit literary research?

Keywords:

• Bernth Lindfors
• literary research
• archive
• empirical
• fieldwork
• knowledge production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer 2 of this manuscript for adding a note in their comment that sums up the argument of this essay: “Lindfors was indeed an archivist. To focus even more on the archives, he asked Thomas Hale to take over the African section of the MLA bibliography, which he did for many years—this before computers and the shift of the bibliography to an in-house operation. Till then it was produced at Penn State by an interdisciplinary team in English and French.”

2 Personal communication. Sunday, June 3, 2018, 2:01p.m.

3 Personal communication. Monday, May 27, 2019, 5:14 p.m.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olabode Ibironke

Olabode Ibironke is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, New Brunswick and the author of Remapping African Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His interests include African and African Diaspora Literatures; Postcolonial Literature and Theory; Postcolonial Book History and Publishing; World Anglophone Literature. He has also published articles on Achebe, Richard Wright, and Dubois as well as on Caribbean authors such as Maryse Condé.