History and Narrative: An Overview. Narrative Works 5, 1 (2015), 174-96. (original) (raw)
Related papers
History and Narrative: An Overview
2015
The articles in this section draw on the texts of plenary lectures presented at the seventh Narrative Matters Conference, Narrative Knowing/Recit et Savoir, organized at the Universite Paris Diderot, in partnership with the American University of Paris, from June 23-27, 2014. Philippe Carrard’s article, “History and Narrative: An Overview,” is a sequel to his latest book, Le Passe mis en texte: Poetique de l’historiographie francaise contemporaine [The Past in Textual Form: A Poetics of Contemporary French Historiography]. In this work, Carrard (2014) sets himself the task of examining, as a scholar of poetics, the writing protocols and conventions used by historians when they finally present the data they have gathered in textual form. One of the major questions of the work concerns to what extent the authors resort to narrative form: does the discourse of the historian always take the form of a narrative and, if not, under what non-narrative forms can it be structured? In the arti...
In universities and academic institutions globally, opinion was divided. There existed sensations of tension, confusion and anger from those involved. Keith Windschuttle sat in his office, staring at a crumpled copy of Simon Schama's 'Dead Certainties'. Questions and accusations streamed through Windschuttle's mind. One kept coming forward the most. How can this 'historian' think it permissible to 'invent some of his own facts, and introduce into his work passages he knows to be fiction'? 1 Windschuttle sat there, infuriated. What did works like Schama's mean? Were 'historians' like Schama and White trying to destroy history altogether? Did they wish to completely merge the obligations and practices of historians with those of novelists? Storm clouds gathered overhead, on the other side of the world, White felt a shiver piercing his peaceful rest. There was a disturbance somewhere; empiricists were angry. This disturbance may not be resolved easily…
Ученые записки Казанского государственного университета, 2021
The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences. Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many "historical theorists" in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic "truth". I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal "theory of history"-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge.
The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory
History and Theory, 1984
... history" itself that was the problem.24 In a famous polemic, directed against Sartre's Critique ... Indeed, his monu-mental Mythologiques was intended to demonstrate the centrality of narra-tivity to the ... in all its forms.28 What he objected to was the expropriation of narrativity as the ...
Analysing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past, 2021
Book description: For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical narratives work, illuminating the ways they can bind together events, shape an argument and lend support to ideology. From ancient Greece to modern-day bestsellers, the studies gathered here offer a wide-ranging analysis of the textual strategies used by historians. They show how in spite of the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ways in which historians tell their stories are inevitably conditioned by their discursive contexts.
Narrative Understanding. On Storytelling, Contingencies and Historiography (1988)
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 50, nr.1, March,1988, p.20-39 / , 1988
It is surprising that the antithesis between poetry and historiography, as elaborated in Aristotle's Poetics, is quasi absent in the debate on narrativism. Although in Temps et Récit Paul Ricoeur calibrates the notion of narrative according to the Aristotelian conception of the poem, the passages concerning this antithesis are neutralised or simply passed over in silence. This article takes up and defends the importance of the opposition. The poem mimes a muthos, an action: a change founded in the nature of things, or goal-oriented, and therefore 'possible' and intelligible. History, on the other hand, deals with 'really happens'. The historian deals with what accidentally, without a reason or a final cause, comes together in time and space: to sumbainon (or: quod contingit), and cannot be (over)seen as a whole (holon). The work of the historian comes down to a 'periodisation' of the contingent. The historical period or text, grounded by a topica, functions as a memory place and makes the contingent comprehensible.
Based on a True Story: Contemporary Historical Fiction and Historiographical Theory
This article considers the history of the historical novel, alongside the development of contemporary historiographic theory. It maps the development of the historical novel from its popular form in the nineteenth-century Romantic period, a time when the novels of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo were rarely subject to critical appraisal, through to the contemporary, postmodern mode where historical narrative is often scrutinised for its (re)presentation of historical "truth". I analyse the works of writers such as Julian Barnes and Jonathan Safran Foer to reflect the blurred lines between narrative histories and stories told in the traditional mode. I ask scholars and readers of the past to overcome their demand that historical works must always present clear, documented evidence to be taken as true, and challenge the assumption that all fictions are merely stories conjured in a writer"s mind. This article examines how much "truth" a fictive text may command, and asks that narrative is not seen to be compromising "truth" but instead in terms of its ability to offer readers access to a past unavailable to traditional or "proper" modes of historical research. I argue that narrative history allows experience an opportunity, and that it is often the encounters we have and the stories we tell that make history accessible, memorable and applicable to our present.
A Brief History of the Idea of Narrative
In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Peters charts the arc not of communication methods or technologies, but the way in which we conceive of communication. Not how do we communicate, but how have we thought about communicating. Hawking is invoked, on the one hand, because contemporary conceptualizations of narrative, in particular their trajectories through the 20th century, are the progeny of multifarious efforts to develop a science of narrative. On the other, Hawking’s seminal monograph, A Brief History of Time (1988), distills an impossibly immense subject -- the history of the universe -- into an impossibly compact space. Narrative may not be so sprawling an object of study as the entire cosmos, but it is, nonetheless, an expansive topic. This paper represents an attempt to trace the variegated, interrelated, evolving, diffuse, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we conceive of narrative. This effort begins with a dispute between (who else?) Aristotle and Plato. Whereas Aristotle provided a rudimentary codification of narrative as form, Plato critiques its use. We then spring forward several millennia to find Georg Lukacs challenging the dominance of the Aristotelean framework, and anticipating by nearly a century Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for a “media-conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 4). I traverse the well-trod terrains of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, and investigate how these movements and their devotees aspired to develop scrupulous empirical principles that would transform the study of narrative and literature into a science: narrative’s scientific turn. A Structuralist splinter faction turned their attention to temporal dynamics, laying the groundwork for narratology. Narratology focuses on the centrality of time (as both interior and exterior to narrative), narrative as a coagulant of historical and temporal coherence, and the twin influences of tradition and cultural context. As an important tangent to print-centric narratology, I discuss the recuperation of orality both as a formidable field in its own right, and as implicative of the importance of identifying medium-specific narrative affordances. In their indispensable accounts of oral storytelling systems, Albert Lord and Walter J. Ong illustrate how narrative, media, and cognition interrelate. Following orality, I provide a brief overview of how narrative theories and epistemologies filtered into other fields and disciplines such as postmodernism, historiography, and cognitive science. In the penultimate section, I will explore the dramatic narrative transmutations prompted by the ascendance of the computer, and the (still acrimonious) collision of stories and games. In closing, I will examine recent attempts to (once again) formulate a “unified theory” of narrative that can account for its protean, media-inflected instantiations, and I suggest several lines of inquiry for how the study of narrative might proceed from this point forward.
History as rhetoric, fable and literary genre
This article provides an insight into the notion of history as a literary genre. It argues that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the concept of “history” was mostly employed in its plural form: “the stories” and not “history” were the predominant form of the concept of history. These “stories” were related to the ancient Ciceronian rhetorical and moral tradition of history as Magistra Vitae (history as life's teacher) and were considered part of the so-called belles-lettres or “literature”.