The Archivist and Autobiographer: Performing Wayne Booth's Legacy

Drawing from its author's experience as Wayne Booth's archivist, this essay explores the rhetorical and performative relationship between an archive and its subject's legacy. Archives are fixed collections of historical artifacts that preserve an evidentiary “truth” about their subjects; meanwhile, they are unstable and dynamic spaces where the past is only imperfectly reanimated through a researcher's rhetorical invention. Using Booth's archive and autobiography, My Many Selves (2006), this essay suggests Booth's life and scholarship make an especially salient case for theorizing the archive as a performative dialogue wherein a plausible harmony can be achieved among archive, subject, and researcher.