Reference:
Review Excerpts 'It is difficult to get an objective history of a scholarly discipline, because if
the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or
another of its sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is
unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distinguish between the significant
and the insignificant events of the field's development' (395).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | discipline | history |
objective |
'In general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as
what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much
invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their
counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences'
(396).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | verbal | 'No given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a
story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements. The events are
made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the
highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and
point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like-- in short, all of the
techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a
play' (397).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | repetition | variation |
'Unless you have some idea of the generic attributes of tragic, comic,
romantic, or ironic situations, you will be unable to recognize them as such when
you come upon them in a literary text' (398).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | idea | literary |
text |
When characterizing psychological therapy, White says that, 'the problem is
to get the parent to "reemplot" his whole life history in such a way as to change
the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the
whole set of events that make up his life' (399).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | history | meaning |
problem |
significance |
'This is what leads me to think that historical narratives are not only models
of past events and processes, but also metaphorical statements which suggest a
relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that
we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned
meanings' (400).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | relation |
'Levi-Strauss concludes: "In spite of worthy and indispensable efforts to
bring another moment in history alive and to possess it, a clairvoyant history
should admit that it never completely escapes from the nature of myth." It is this
mediative function that permits us to speak of a historical narrative as an
extended metaphor' (402).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | function | history |
metaphor |
myth |
narrative |
nature |
'The hackneyed phrase "My love, a rose" is not obviously, intended to be
understood as suggestion that the loved one is actually a rose' (402).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | phrase |
'Histories, then, are not only about events but also about the possible sets of
relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure. These sets of
relationships are not, however, immanent in the events themselves; they exist only
in the mind of the historian reflecting on them' (403-4).
Domains: Under construction |
'In any field of study which, like history, has not yet become disciplinized to
the point of constructing a formal terminological system for describing its objects,
in the way that physics and chemistry have, it is the types of figurative discourse
that dictate the fundamental forms of the data to be studied' (404).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | data | discourse |
history |
study |
system |
'The fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various
forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in
general and therefore in historiography too, can be characterized in terms of the
dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all
significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to
represent those relationships in language' (405).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | language | narrative |
paradigm |
theory |
trope |
world |
'The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is
conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the
representation of the actual, must five place to the recognition that we can only
know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable'
(406).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | distinction | history |
recognition |
representation |
'To say that we make sense of the real world by imposing upon it the formal
coherency that we customarily associate with the products of writers of fiction in
no way detracts from the status as knowledge which we ascribe to historiography'
(407).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | knowledge | status |
world |
'It may be observed that if historians were to recognize the fictive element in
their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the
status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent
antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological
preconceptions which they do not recognize as such but honor as the "correct"
perception of "the way things really are."' (40x).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | correct | ideology |
perception |
recognition |
status |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 15:43:33
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