Resumen de Poetics of the Proto-Archive: creating the Industrial Workers' Redemption
The point of departure of this article is the analysis of the inedited personal archive of Catalan politician and composer Josep Anselm Clavé (1824-1874), in particular his correspondance and manuscripts, that is to say documents that we attribute to the private sphere and that most of the time are deemed to contain the «authentic voices of the past,» an affirmation that the article questions. From there, I draw a theory that reveals the private archive not as a symbol of spontaneous authenticity, but as the place where letters and works were written and compiled for a future use. The article questions the mythological discourse built around Clavé's figure, and the analysis of the inedited documents permits to reveal how the composer was controlling very closely his archive construction as a way and desire to handle his own inscription in the archive memory of Catalan cultural history. The article defines the personal proto-archive as the set of strategies that serve to construct the conduit between private and public, and between past and present.
