Plath Profiles 5: Another Preview

Gail Crowther and I have written a fourth conversation of archival our adventures. In "These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England" we pick up where "These Ghostly Archives 3" left off, with Gail sailing to America for her first visit to Sylvia Plath's home country, conquering New York City and much of Massachusetts from the Cape to the Pioneer Valley.  In "TGA4" we challenge the traditional notion of the archive as a bricks and mortal repository for documents, and we assert the archive lives in a community like Northampton and the Smith College campus, in which Plath's presence can be felt just as much as on a manuscript of her poetry. From our paper, "We would also like to introduce to you the notion that the boundaries which contain the contents of an archive can at times become a little blurry. In fact, sometimes, especially when dealing with Plath and Smith College, it can feel like the archive is everywhere – not just simply papers and the place that contains them, but literally a living archive reflecting history on the ground. In this case, we could even say that the archive is 'a dynamic space,' both preserving itself and working with contemporary changes taking place around it" (12)

In "These Ghostly Archives 4: Looking for New England," we discuss the Sylvia Plath Collection, but as well we talk about Sylvia Plath's correspondence and relationship with The New Yorker magazine, held at the New York Public Library, additional Plath manuscripts and other archival materials in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, also at the NYPL, and a letter of Plath's held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.