
Curating Worlds
Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature
Emma Bond(Author)
Northwestern University Press
Will be published approx. on 31. March 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
216 pages
978-0-8101-4795-9 (ISBN)
Description
Showing how museum practices shed new light on literary form How and why do books deploy objects in order to narrate the past? To answer this question, Emma Bond sifts through collections of objects stored in boxes, drawers, baskets, and displayed on shelves in contemporary texts by authors such as Valeria Luiselli, Maaza Mengiste, Orhan Pamuk, and Olga Tokarczuk and interprets them using a framework of museum practices. These practices, which include collection, curation, conservation, and display, have helped to turn real-life museums into three-dimensional narrative spaces. Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature shows how we can use this same set of practices to shed light on literary form itself: how stories are created, shaped, and communicated. Harnessing museum practices as an innovative lens for critical interpretation, Bond provides a fresh theoretical framework to engage with the meanings of object collections in literature and to make sense of the lives, and afterlives, of things today.
Reviews / Votes
"Curating Worlds proposes an exhilarating new way of understanding contemporary world literature by examining its dynamic relationships to material practices that orient readers within spatial and temporal trajectories. Dazzling in its originality and ambition, and written in engaging prose, the work comes off so successfully that the reader hardly recognizes the audacious novelty of the project." -Rebecca Falkoff, University of Texas at Austin "Bond has mastered and synopsized the gigantic body of literature that constitutes museology, curation, collecting, and world literature. She writes with a rare elegance and erudition that makes for a lively and scholarly book. Curating Worlds is crucially adding to the blossoming field of 'world literature.'" -Allan Hepburn, McGill UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
24 b&w halftones
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-4795-9 (9780810147959)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Emma Bond is a professor of Italian and comparative studies at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her books include Writing Migration through the Body, and she has served as an advisor or guest curator for a number of museums, including V&A Dundee, the Watt Institution, and the Wardlaw Museum.
Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Orientation
Chapter 1. Collecting
Chapter 2. Curating
Chapter 3. Display
Chapter 4. Storage
Chapter 5. Conservation
Chapter 6. Restitution
Conclusion: Deaccession
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Orientation
Chapter 1. Collecting
Chapter 2. Curating
Chapter 3. Display
Chapter 4. Storage
Chapter 5. Conservation
Chapter 6. Restitution
Conclusion: Deaccession
Notes
Bibliography