Posted on by Katrin Horn

ArchivalGossip goes Podcast!

Bit of news: I’ve recently been invited to join the always great LadyFiction-Podcast to talk with Dr. Stefanie Schäfer about (transatlantic) gossip in periodicals (e.g. the writing of Anne Hampton Brewster, from whose “American Artists in Rome” my opening quote is taken) – of course, Charlotte Cushman also made an appearance!

In this special Women’s History Month episode, Stefanie Schäfer discusses gossip with American Studies scholar Katrin Horn, head of the research project www.archivalgossip.com. Following the trajectories of American artists in Rome, and specifically the making of actress Charlotte Cushman’s celebrity persona, they read the functions of gossip in 19th-century US magazines between the intimate and the political, between escapism and nation building, and they also ponder the question of how gossip became gendered.

Session summary by Trans-Atlanticist

You can listen or download here!

Posted on by Katrin Horn

Archives of Queer Intimacy

(or: musings on past obsessions and a new publication)

In my attempts to make sense of my encounters with ‘the archive’, I’ve stumbled upon Maryanne Dever’s article “Garbo’s Foot, Or, Sex, Socks, and Letters” (2010), which not only namechecks about 50% of my interests in its title, but also – and more importantly – makes a wonderful case for archival absences (“nothing”) as evidence. The introductory paragraph reads as follows:

In November 2006 I found myself staring at item no. 80 from Box 23 of the Greta Garbo material held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia […] this visit was the culmination of a six-year desire to see what ‘nothing’ looked like.

(Dever 2010 163)
Garbo and de Acosta, 1930s

“Nothing,” of course, being the relationship between Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta – according to the Rosenbach Museum and other “stake holders” in Garbo’s posthumous fame, a wishful thinking, a figment of people’s imagination. Certainly not a defining part of the life and legacy of one of cinema’s most enigmatic stars.

If we count more metaphorical archives (of popular culture, of auto/biographies), then I’ve searched them for “something” – meaning, traces, evidence, inspiration, whatever you wanna call it – where “nothing” was supposed to be for a very long time. In my early twenties, I devoured biographies like Barry Paris’ Garbo and de Acosta’s infamous Here Lies the Heart. I might have watched more movies and series for subtext than for main text. Always sure, there was something. (I’m not claiming my interest in gossip is neutral.)

Castle, Terry (1993): The Apparitional Lesbian. Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP.
Read more
Posted on by Katrin Horn

History Of Knowledge

Blog Post on Gossip

After my research stay at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, last spring, the editors of their History of Knowledge-Blog kindly invited me to contribute a blog post on gossip’s relevance to studying the history of knowledge.

My thoughts on gossip, queer history, and archives entitled “An Intimate Knowledge of the Past? Gossip in the Archives” can be found here.

Besides some theoretical observations about what defines gossip and how we know history, the post also has ALL the drama of Charlotte Cushman’s most notorious break-up.

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Posted on by Katrin Horn

Conference CfP

The Call for Papers for our first project-related conference is now online: please consider joining us in Bayreuth next October for Speculative Endeavors: Cultures of Knowledge and Capital in the Long Nineteenth Century. Deadline for submissions is Nov 22, 2019.

Keynote speakers are Peter Knight (Manchester), author of Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (Johns Hopkins UP), and Lori Merish (Georgetown), author of Archives of Labor:  Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States (Duke UP)

We expect to publish the program of Speculative Endavors: Cultures of Knowledge and Capital in the Long Nineteenth Century in the spring of 2020.

Posted on by Katrin Horn

First Project Publication

The most tangible result of my time at the Library of Congress so far: my article on the uses of gossip in Edith Wharton’s fiction is now available online!

Abstract:
In the United States of the late nineteenth century, the home was increasingly discussed in terms of privacy and the domestic was viewed as a protected “feminine sphere.” Focusing on the work of an author almost synonymous with the literary depiction of homes, Edith Wharton, this article questions domestic myths of the US home. As a vehicle for its critique, it relies on a mode of communication that is firmly located in the domestic sphere and yet destabilizes its premises of privacy and sanctity: gossip. By analyzing the depiction of homes and the reliance on “idle talk” as both content and narrative technique in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Summer, the article shows how Wharton exposes the feminine sphere as a dangerous place. To this end, she combines elements of Gothic fiction that subvert the domestic ideal with depictions of homes that are porous to gossip, which both uncovers abuses and invites them. Concentrating her attention on female protagonists (rather than enfranchised white men), Wharton paints a drastically different picture of the home and the possibility of shielding the private from economic or public concerns than evoked in contemporary legal and journalistic discourses.

(author: Katrin Horn)