Ways of Representing Accumulation: The Archive and the Collection in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and John Fowles’ the Collector

The paper explores the desire of accumulating in our contemporary society by analysing two processes: that of archiving and that of collecting; and how these are represented in literature, in novels such as Everything is Illuminated, which deals with the preservation of memory through the archive; and The Collector, which brings a different perspective on the act of collecting, namely, the relationship between collecting, possession and fetishism.