Ephemera as souvenirs and collection items

The function of ephemera as souvenirs and within collections can be considered by way of the chapter Objects of Desire in Susan Stewart's book On Longing (Stewart, S; On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection; Duke University Press, London, 1993). Stewart draws attention to the capacity of objects to serve as 'traces of authentic experience'. (pg 135). "We need or desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative. Through narrative the souvenir substitutes a context of perpetual consumption for its context of origin. It is an object that arises from longing and the demands of nostalgia, not use value or need". (pg 135) The author goes on to talk about the souvenir as a metonymic object in the sense that it's a sample. It moves history into 'private time'. (pg. 136 - 138). "The delicate and hermetic world of the souvenir is a world of nature idealised; nature is removed from the domain of struggle into the domestic sphere of the individual and the interior". (pg. 145) She distinguishes between the book and the souvenir as narrative vehicles. Then she examines the nature of the collection, saying it's metaphor rather than metonymy. "The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection's world". (pg. 151).