Bernth Lindfors’s archive fever

Abstract Bernth Lindfors recently sent me a manuscript on Don Herdeck, which signals an active post-retirement research career. Herdeck famously published and promoted African literature for almost three decades in the United States. The biography of authors and figures such as Herdeck that constitute Lindfors’s forte is the more exciting aspect of the cold hard facts he spent his entire career investigating. Of what relevance is the material history of writing to the study of literature? This is precisely the question for Lindfors, an ardent researcher who argues that a literary scholarship has no claim to knowledge or a disciplinary field without biography and archival research. Is it accurate to assume that empirical data offer the best explanation and indubitable expression of knowledge? How should archives function in literary scholarship? How do empirical data and reliance on archival research condition our understanding of texts or define and delimit literary research?