Afterlives of Abandoned Work considers the relevance of unfinished projects to literary history and criticism, looking beyond famous posthumous work to investigate the abandoned everyday, from scrapped plans and rejected ideas to half-written novels or unfinished artistic works. It traces how the reading of abandoned creative endeavor—whether arriving in the form of a rejection letter, a disagreement with a collaborator, or the simple act of walking away from one’s desk—can change the way we think about cultural production, the creative process, and the intellectual construction of everyday life. Over five distinct journeys through a variety of archives, from major research libraries to the unique collections of individual enthusiasts, Matthew Harle draws surprising connections between literary studies, media studies, and visual arts, exploring unfinished projects from Thomas Pynchon, Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Harold Pinter, and others. Rooted in literary criticism, Afterlives of Abandoned Work reads unbuilt buildings, unfilmed screenplays, and unpublished novels and radio sketches as forms of text that can help us consider the enduring fragmentation and anecdotal construction of cultural form, as well as expand literary criticism’s approach to the archive.
Matthew Harle is a writer, archive curator and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Barbican Centre, UK. His writing has appeared in a number of publications, such as Sight & Sound, Screen, CITY and Cineaste, and he is the co-editor of Of Mud and Flame: A Penda’s Fen Sourcebook (2018).
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work 2. The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano del Rio3. Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Postwar London 4. A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust5. The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives6. Remains to Be Seen: AfterwordBibliographyIndex
One of the foundational manoeuvres of the critical historian of culture is to turn finished works into unfinished ones. Matthew Harle has a head’s start here, and he capitalises on it brilliantly revealing the unrealised, the unmade and the abandoned as the ghostly DNA of the cultural sphere.