Object-Based Narratives: The Creative Traffic between Literary and Museological Practices.

The proposed research topic will investigate how museums and especially their education departments employ literature and creative writing, and how these practices can be illuminated by contemporary literary output that also responds and engages with the cultural prominence of object-based narratives. This interdisciplinary research project will draw on contemporary cultural instances where practices and techniques from literary and language-based systems are used to enhance the engagement with objects and artworks, and how these, in turn, are written in Postmillennial British fiction. The first part of the project will be outlined here which is provisionally entitled ‘Structures of Attention: Curatorial and Museological Practices in Contemporary British Fiction’. It will address this creative traffic by focusing on the largely underexplored impact of curatorial and museological practices in contemporary British fiction. Structures of Attention: First the project examines how contemporary British novels employ museological and curatorial techniques such as labelling, taxonomy and display, in order to emulate the culturally resonant ways that museums construct and project reified meaning and object-based lives. Jon McGregor in So Many Ways to Begin (2006), for instance, titles his chapters with short entries on material detritus from the main character’s life, entries that resemble museum labels: “pair of cinema tickets, annotated, 19th May 1967”, “girl’s hairbrush, wooden-handled, c.1940s”. His novel is structured by everyday objects, official papers, postcards, and their insertion in the narrative of the protagonist’s life activates their meaning potential. Patrick Gale’s Notes from an Exhibition (2007) uses extensive curator’s notes as epigraphs to chapters. Written text from an imaginary exhibition on a recently deceased artist labels the narration which follows the life of her family. The narrative inserts the artworks into different interpretative frameworks than those of the exhibition and the gap between what gallery-goers know and what readers know becomes the point of interpretative tension, amplified by the insertion of museum labelling. Spaces of Unstable Meanings: Secondly, the project will analyse how contemporary fiction uses the museum space as a locus where the fragmentary life-stories of objects intersect with unstable narrations of identity. In Marina Warner’s The Leto Bundle (2001) when cultural artefacts are put on public display, their reception and interpretation is proven to be contingent and polysemic. As research in museology turns to narratological and translation models for creating narrative environments  for the visitor/interpreter, in fiction the unstable histories projected into the museum space achieve to re-enforce this plurality of interpretative possibilities and the cultural mobility of the exhibited object. In sum, the interdisciplinary nature of this project enables co-consideration of the creative traffic between museological and literary practices and puts new museology’s fascination with ‘interpretative environments’ in dialogue with fictional appropriations of its own methods of ordering, exhibiting, and producing meaning. Finally, by analysing the vital narrative work which museological practices perform in contemporary fiction, and the new possibilities for education and engagement that writing and reading affords to museum audiences, such a study will help us to understand why today the museum is so central to our understanding of culture.