Ways of Representing Accumulation: The Archive and the Collection in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and John Fowles’ the Collector

Erika Ada

doi:10.2478/rjes-2013-0017

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Ways of Representing Accumulation: The Archive and the Collection in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and John Fowles’ the Collector

Romanian Journal of English Studies

Volume 10 (2013): Issue 1 (March 2013)

By: Erika Ada

Open Access

|Feb 2013

Abstract

The paper explores the desire of accumulating in our contemporary society by analysing two processes: that of archiving and that of collecting; and how these are represented in literature, in novels such as Everything is Illuminated, which deals with the preservation of memory through the archive; and The Collector, which brings a different perspective on the act of collecting, namely, the relationship between collecting, possession and fetishism.

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