Towards a Diffractive Reading of the Folkloric Archive: Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and the Wild Pedagogies

Abstract

“Archive” comes from the Ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον, “house of the ruler”: inside, we find what corresponds to the normative framework; outside, everything that dissents and is not conform. This occurs for the heteropatriarchal archive of intimate partner violence, as it is explored by Carmen Maria Machado in In the Dream House (2019), and for the archive of folklore, ruled by each (re-)teller’s framework. What if we regain the oral dimension of the tale tradition in a diffractive perspective? What if the reader entangles with the text, co-creating a new meaning? In this paper, I propose to shed a light on the possibilities of diffracting the folkloric archive, to shift the archival-ruled narratives in the direction of self-representation and empoderamiento for the subjectivities expelled from the archival narratives. Two are the paths proposed: firstly, situated literary retellings, with a focus on Machado’s memoir; and secondly, wild pedagogy and slow scholarship methodologies and practices, enabling the experience of the reader to entangle with and diffract the tales’ narratives.