Collecting and reading the Dreyfus Affair through Postcards: A Dialectics between two collections

• In Event: Material Cultures

Abstract

Drawing on the Harry Ransom Center and the Lorraine Beitler Library archives, my research focuses on serial postcards published during the Dreyfus Affair. The first collection was formed during the time of the Affair by an unknown collector, whereas the second one was assembled in 'a posteriori.' Based on my findings from these two collections, I argue that postcards in circulation during the Dreyfus Affair were not just 'popular artifacts' but also 'literary objects' – a form of popular literature – in complement to newspapers or could have become, at some point, a reading media in its own right. This postulate considers the serial novel's influence, which saw a fragmentary type of reading emerge. My argument invites me to consider how the visual representation of the Affair might have been 'read.' Thus, this paper aims to rethink, as a whole, the role of the postcard medium in the context of the Dreyfus Affair.
I propose two axes of study. The first is to consider the Dreyfus postcard as a collector's item, and using Jean Baudrillard's terminology in "Le système des objets," to establish how its absorption into a series can constitute the substratum of a 'latent, repetitive, tenacious discourse' destined to transcend its ephemerality during the Affair and beyond. The second line of inquiry examines the modalities in which the postcard might have constituted a new way of reading the Affair, starting from the revision of the Dreyfus trial in 1899, and how it has been reread in the 21st century from the contemporary collector's point of view. This dialectics approach between the two collections, while demonstrating the interplay between reading practices and the act of collecting, aims at establishing how the historicity of the Affair may have been viewed by some and others from a proleptic and analeptic point of view, underscoring the significant role of the postcards in this historical event.

Author

• Karine Macarez, University of Pennsylvania