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Historical Narrative as Performative Structuration

2013

Through an analysis of key insights from two central figures of philosophy of history, Louis Mink and Hayden White, this article tries to answer the following questions: firstly, why can narrative structure be thought as a cognitive instrument (Mink) for the historian?; secondly, why is narrative structure best approached as a product of a figurative operation of emplotment (White)?; and finally, why is historical narration’s cognitive-imaginary double nature – the production of interpretations of past events by endowing them with the meaning of plot conventions – best comprehended as a performative structuration? This last question sums up my interest in presenting a third way of thinking about historiography’s supposed hybridity elaborated from my particular re-working of Mink’s and White’s reflections with an important difference: I will not pursue the traditional line of thought of history’s scientific-literary hybridity. Instead, I will argue that we can approach historical nar...

Louis Mink and narrative structure as a primary cognitive instrument 1 . 1 . Chronicle versus narrative

2014

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.

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...

Narration and the experience of history

Semiotica, 2017

For a long time, history has been conceived as a textual fact, whether as positive knowledge of the past, reported in chronicles and original sources, or through acknowledgment of its textual basis, assumed as historiography, as narrative history. In either case, the text appears as the source and goal of knowledge, and has assumed the nature of an immutable monument, an invariable object of reference and information. These texts are limited to constituting a regulatory storehouse of knowledge, a mere object of appropriation. In contrast, we can consider history not just as knowledge enclosed in textual containers, but as experience inscribed in peoples´ memory. This is what Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman suggests with his proposal to consider history as readers formulating their own versions of the past. Through these proposals, semiotics is in a position to describe the role of texts in the production of a vicarious experience of history through the act of reading. This paper ...

Narrative Philosophy of History. An Epistemic Approach

University of California, Santa Cruz, 2021

This dissertation seeks to vindicate the place that narrative has in historiography and recognize the rational components that are involved in narrative construction. The first chapter of this dissertation develops a novel account of some of the cognitive principles that are involved in narrative construction. One of the central aims of this chapter is to challenge the long-standing idea that narratives do not entail any rational or logical structure. I argue that the principles of organization brought to light by the Gestalt school of experimental psychology illuminate the principles underlying an organizational logic that historians engage in when constructing a narrative. Having developed an account of the “principles of narrative reason” in Chapter 1, I turn in Chapter 2 to the challenge presented by the multiplicity of interpretations in history. An answer to this challenge needs to explain the persistence of the diversity in historiography while maintaining epistemic standards. Chapter 2 first examines two attempted answers to this phenomenon. I argue that neither offers a satisfactory resolution. By developing a Wittgenstenien notion of aspect perception I provide a novel account of aspects as applied to the case of historical explanation, one that yields a more philosophically satisfactory answer to the “diversity problem.” Finally, the last chapter of this dissertation sketches a normative epistemic account of historiography. For although there exist multiple ways of understanding a particular event, we can nonetheless identify criteria that can guide us in deciding which narrative is better than another. I argue that three prevailing normative accounts of historiography (realist, antirealist and the tripartite theory of justification account) all prove unsuccessful in providing a good normative framework. My positive account is inspired by the works of Catherine Elgin and Alva Noë. Particularly, by Elgin’s notion of understanding–in opposition to knowledge– and Noë’s conception of reorganization in artistic creation. I conclude this dissertation by suggesting an important link between aesthetics and historiography. One that recognizes the value of reorganization and understanding as central to the epistemic significance of these disciplines

Tópicos Especiais (EGA 10094): Theories of Narrative

Fundamental problems of theories of narrative. From narrative forms to textual structures: the relationship between history, narrative and narration. The narrative structures: function, action, and narration; the structural principles of myth and narrative forms. The temporal structure of narratives: order, duration, and frequency; the links between understanding and expressing time in narrative forms. The modes of narrative: mimesis and diegesis. The problem of narrative voices: discourse, enunciation, point of view, focalization. Narrative and reality: the crossings between history and fiction. Pragmatic approaches to narrative studies: the active dimension of reception of narrative texts; paradigms of narrative tension (suspense, curiosity, surprise). The different semiotic materials of narrative discourse. Prologue: There is a considerable importance attached to systematic studies of narrative communication in the culture of modern media culture-which is proportional to the misapprehension of its manifestation in our field of study. Firstly, in several theses, books, and articles circulating in spheres of communication research, there are constant references to notions such as "narrative", "narrativity", "narration", but mentioned in such a degree of generality that enables a thought about the precise meaning of these conceptual employments. In that sense, narrative is a keyword articulating issues that are specific to several discursive practices in media universes (thus related to variables that make up the problem of enunciation as an aspect of communicational texts): merged in such a fashion are two topic orders of inquiry that narrative theories had clearly delineated as " narrativity, on one side, and "discourse", on the other. Another general instance of reference to narrative universes is one in which " fabulatory " or " fictional " dimensions of certain processes and products of our field of studies are intuitively assimilated to the very concept of narrative: in these cases, to think of the idea that the " historical " meaning of these practices is defined as a nucleus of narrations (where confusion here occurs between concepts of "narrative" and " history "). We might continue enumerating similar cases indefinitely, but the diagnosis should be clear by now: in most speeches of theories and research in communication studies, the reference to narrative is merely pretextual, at least as regards to conceptual clarity animating theories of narrative: the extensive theoretical corpus of narratology is an item of considerable disdain from media theories – being such a conceptual good something coming from literary studies, epistemology of history, or philosophy of language. Disciplines that had reflected on narrative forms, their internal structures and functioning, the epistemic orders assumed for its actualization in the reader's/beholder's experience, their relationships with mental and historical structures of understanding eventfulness, its diversified manifestations in objects, modes and means, the extent of their genres rules, all these specific aspects of a study of narratives were dissolved in most of its evocation in the name of merely " historical/contextual or discursive/ideological meanings of practices, processes and products of media universes. In this sense, we must recover the centre of a rigorous reflection on the conceptual/ phenomenal status of narrativity and its importance for theories of communication, in a context where understanding these phenomena necessarily passes through the recognition of the legitimacy of a communicational question: what, after all, is narrating something?

“Concepts of the Discourse of Historiography: Paul Ricouer and Hayden White.”

Budai László emlékkönyv. Veszprém: Veszprém UP, 2004., 2004

In this paper my aim is to call attention to an issue of a frequently questioned field of historical studies, namely a contemporary interdisciplinary approach to the philosophy of history. The latter sets out from philosophy and investigates the so-called postmodern concepts of the relationship of the past and its historical representation: the gap between reality and its narration, as well as the question of the accessibility of truth(s) about the past. Present-day historians often argue that the philosophical aspect of history writing is not the main interest of their inquiries. However, without a firm theoretical basis they might easily run into difficulties. My purpose here is not to argue for or against the relevance of the philosophy of history but to show how its scope is extended with findings in other fields of knowledge, such as literary criticism and philosophy. Two major figures in the study of the relationship between these fields are Paul Ricouer and Hayden White. Both have made efforts to present the commonalities of writing history and fiction, focusing on the narrativisation of the human past.

Narrative Strategies and Counter-History in \El Estrecho Dudoso\

1994

The most remarkable feature of Ernesto Cardenal's El estrecho dudoso is its collage of unaltered fragments of canonical and non-canonical historiographical documents pertaining to the discovery, conquest and colonization of Central America. The result is that intertextuality, that is, the concentration and legibility (visibility and explicitness) of external or alien discursive structures within a text, 1 constitutes the dominant structuring device in the poem. Frequent use of quotation marks, faithful transcription of the sources stylistic idiosyncrasies and archaisms, and typographical highlighting of segments of these pretexts make explicit Cardenal's unabashed borrowing. El estrecho dudoso appears to expose consciously its identity as "a text constructed as a mosaic of quotations; as an absorption and transformation of other texts." 2 For the most part and in keeping with the overall trend in the criticism of Cardenal, readers have ignored El estrecho's intertextual dimension. Although this trait is consistent with one of the main tenets of exteriorismo-Cardenal's chosen term for the expansion of the range of textual types allowed into poetic discourse-there has been no assessment of the impact of this tenet on the discursive configuration of the Cardenalian text 3. Moreover, critics need to assess exteriorismo in termos of more conventional principles of poetic discourse in contemporary Latin America; and more specifically, its effects on a poem's production of meaning. One of the consequences of El estrecho's borrowing techniques is its strong dialogic quality, manifested by a consistently present double-voiced

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