The essay develops the notion of “the deleted archive” on the basis of Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) and through looking at several literary works: a short story by Alice Munro, a memoir by Amnon Shamosh, a diary by Annie Ernaux, and a novel by Yehoshua Kenaz. These works, which observe from different subject positions elderly people in an acute condition of illness, mostly Alzheimer’s disease, variously challenge the concept of the archive or the patriarchive. Oblivion, degree zero of symbolicity, deleted poetics, and the nursing home as a heterotopy are several ideas the essay tackles in order to analyze the literal-literary engagement with archive fever.
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Michal Ben-Naftali (2026) studied this question.
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