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Possible worlds of fiction and history: The postmodern stage
Abstract
With Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, Lubomír Doležel reexamines the claim - made first by Roland Barthes and then popularized by Hayden White - that "there is no fundamental distinction between fiction and history." Doležel rejects this assertion and demonstrates how literary and discourse theory can help the historian to restate the difference between fiction and history. He challenges scholars to reassess the postmodern viewpoint by reintroducing the idea of possible worlds. Possible-worlds semantics reveals that possible worlds of fiction and possible worlds of history differ in their origins, cultural functions, and structural and semantic features. Doležel's book is the first systematic application of this idea to the theory and philosophy of history. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History is the crowning work of one of literary theory's most engaged thinkers. © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
... Even though this classification has been contested because alternative histories do not include staples of the science fiction genre, such as parallel universes, time travel, and extraterrestrials, the Yiddish Policemen's Union is considered a part of the subcategory of science fiction known as alternative history. According to Doležel (2010), "Science fiction projects a future that varies greatly from the reality of the author's present; counterfactual historical fiction alters the past to project a present that differs substantially from the actual state of things" (p. 107). ...
This article tries to investigate the connection space and time as they pertain to the fictitious world of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007). The book shows significant concerns regarding the existence of Israel as well as the concept of a Jewish state. By analysing the function of eruvim in the construction and contestation of Jewish identity in Chabon's postmodern detective novel from 2007, this study argues that Chabon creates a universe in which geographical place complicates rather than simplifies Jewish identity in diaspora and postmodernity. This study accomplishes its goal by analysing the function of eruvim in analysing Chabon's postmodern detective novel from 2007. So, the Jewish Alaska that exists in Chabon's imagination has a significant link to the contentious assertions that he has made regarding the contemporary geographical state of Israel.
... Abbotts Kollegin Marie-Laure Ryan (2007, 26) geht beim Narrativ als "discourse that conveys a story" einen Schritt weiter und betont mit Hinweis auf den unterschiedlichen Gebrauch von Narrativen in menschlicher Kommunikation die zentrale Rolle der "story" (Geschichte) im Narrativ, die "not tied to any particular medium" und "independent of the disctinction between fiction and non-fiction" sei, auch wenn sich die fiktionalen und non-fiktionalen Texte in ihrem Wahrheitsanspruch und ihrer Funktion in Bezug auf die Welt unterscheiden (Doležel 2002(Doležel , 2010. Dies entspricht durchaus auch der Erfahrung, dass man derselben "Geschichte" in der Zeitung sowie in Literatur, Film oder Ausstellungen begegnen kann, wo jeweils spezifische Ausdrucksformen und Genres genutzt werden.1 Noch wichtiger ist allerdings Ryans Verbindung des Narrativs mit der menschlichen Interaktion, Emotionalität und Intentionalität und in diesem Zusammenhang die Deutung des Narrativs als Transformation und Lösung menschlicher Konflikte. ...
... Due to the multiplicity of ways via which imaginary worlds are now engaged with across so many potential media forms, achieving this aim means studying imaginary worlds via a broader arsenal of conceptual tools taken from far more social, historical, and anthropological disciplinary approaches, yielding it is does a more holistic and culturalized understanding of how a given imaginary world becomes embedded in the everyday lives of its audiences and shaped by a range of real-world phenomena. Lubomír Doležel (2010) once stated that you cannot truly interpret a fictional world without grounding it to terms and concepts found in the real world. As Frank Branch and Rebekah Phillips (2018: 383) also observe in this vein: 'A well-structured ontology becomes an encyclopedia that grounds frames of reference within a transmedia fictional world to the world we live in. ...
... Al conformar el Dossier con el estudio documental de Natalia Mendoza y el literario de Daniella Blejer, hemos intentado evocar uno de los orígenes de la teoría narrativa contemporánea, en la exploración de las diferencias entre el discurso documental y el discurso ficticio. Roland Barthes (1994Barthes ( [1967) y Hayden White (1973) mostraron cómo la historiografía utilizaba modelos literarios para construir el pasado e iniciaron una revuelta que llevó a historiadores y, sobre todo, a novelistas para que vieran en la historia una forma de ficción (Dolezel 2010). Aunque White no fue tan lejos, hizo evidente una dimensión de la historia que había sido desatendida, la manera en que las piezas documentales establecen a menudo su coherencia y unidad a partir de tramas, géneros y tropos literarios. ...
Si bien los estudios literarios han abordado problemas relativos al crimen organizado en México, sus investigaciones se han enfocado en la narconovela, los narcocorridos y la literatura del norte, de tal suerte que son escasos los trabajos que se ocupen de las narraciones en torno a estos fenómenos desde el campo de la teoría narrativa. Me refiero a esa área interdisciplinaria que estudia las narraciones independientemente de si son o no literarias. Es un campo que tiene la virtud de promover la colaboración entre la antropología, la sociología, los estudios literarios y otras disciplinas. Su elasticidad permite explorar conjuntamente cómo se ha dado cuenta del crimen organizado en relatos orales, en el periodismo escrito y televisivo, en etnografías, en informes oficiales y en ficciones de toda índole.
... As its theoretical lens, this article uses Lubomir Doležel's (2010) distinction between fictional worlds created in the work of literature based on a particular historical event and historical worlds evoked in the historical narrative documenting this event. As Doležel writes, fictional worlds are "imaginary alternates of the actual world, " whereas historical worlds are "cognitive models of the actual past" (33). ...
This essay examines the forms of history and memory representation in Incendies, the 2004 play by Wajdi Mouawad, and its 2010 film version, directed by Denis Villeneuve. Incendies tells the story of a twin brother and sister on the quest to uncover the mystery of their mother's past and the silence of her last years. A contemporary re-telling of the Oedipus myth, the play examines what kind of cultural, collective, and individual memories inform the journeys of its characters, who are exilic children. The play serves Mouawad as a public platform to stage the testimony of his childhood trauma: the trauma of war, the trauma of exilic adaptation, and the challenges of return. As this essay argues, when moved from one medium to another, Mouawad's work forces the directors to seek its historical and geographical contextualization. If in its original staging, Incendies allows Mouawad to elevate the story of his personal suffering to the universals of abandoned childhood, to reach in its language the realms of poetic expression, and to make memory a separate, almost tangible entity on stage, then the 2010 film version by Villeneuve turns this play into an archaeological site to excavate the recent history of a single war-torn Middle East country (supposedly Lebanon), an objective at odds with Mouawad's own view of theatre as a venue where poetry meets politics. Naturally the transposition from a play to a film presupposes a significant mutation of the original and raises questions of textual fidelity. This essay, however, does not propose a simple comparative analysis of two works, but aims to discuss: 1) how and to what effect the palimpsest history of Mouawad's play is transferred onto the screen; and 2) how and to what effect its testimonial chronotope is actualized in Villeneuve's film. As its theoretical lens, this paper uses Lubomir Doležel's distinction between fictional worlds created in the work of literature based on a particular historical event and historical worlds evoked in the historical narrative documenting and analyzing this event.
Il saggio ha funzione di panoramica e di ricerca. Disegna un quadro della narrativa italiana degli anni Novanta con particolare riferimento agli esordienti per arrivare a proporre alcune costanti dello spazio letterario del decennio che permangono anche negli anni seguenti. Si individuano cinque famiglie principali (giovane narrativa, pulp/cannibali, high postmodernism, narrativa di genere, bassa finzionalità) e cinque costanti: adesione al postmoderno; utilizzo del pop come cultura condivisa; commistione intermediale e velocità; tensione all’immediatezza; interesse per estremo, corpo ed emozioni. Si suggerisce che le scritture degli anni Novanta insistono sul problema dell’identità, letta in termini di scissione o antitesi bloccate o stati borderline.
The Dark Room (2001), the most critically acclaimed and award-winning novel by Rachel Seiffert, a British writer of Australian-German parenthood, has drawn the attention of scholars within the fields of postmemorial and German post-generational literature, trauma and Holocaust scholarship. These have principally focused on the role of photography as a means of accessing the inexpressible “real” and the hidden truths of German family participation in the horrors of genocide. Without abandoning a postmemorial viewpoint, this chapter explores the novel through a Bachelardian phenomenology of architectural and domestic imagery, and through Antoni Vidler’s “architectural uncanny” (1982). Reading it through this lens reveals how this post-generational narrative discloses two intertwined phenomena: First, the anxieties of estrangement, the rupture of familial and community bonds and displacement during the final days of World War Two in Germany. And second, the uncanny experience of homelessness and contemporary haunting that continues to reverberate through European memory. This chapter ends by suggesting that the narrative ultimately speaks to a reconciliation with the past once unveiled and a metaphorical return-home, thus proffering an inkling of hope and a return to meaning in our post-generational era of contemporary haunting, placing it within an aesthetics of reconstructive postmodernism.
The article addresses the 2007 novel Who Killed Andrei Warhol: The American Diary of a Soviet Journalist by Alexander J. Motyl, analyzing its literary representations of the factual and the counterfactual. In his comic narrative about the past, constructed in the form of a diary of a Soviet journalist, Motyl blurs the line between historical and fictionalized facts. As a result, fictional characters (journalist Ivanov, Soviet communists Kelebek and Kolibri, Katyusha) and historical persons (Andy Warhol, Julia Zawacka, Valerie Solanas, Gus Hall, Morris Childs) co-exist on equal footing. Motyl’s novel is also regarded as a critique of the USSR, communist ideology, and propaganda, and as a satire on postmodern thinking. The article discusses the genre features of Who Killed Andrei Warhol as a novel written in the form of a pseudo diary. The theoretical framework of the article is provided by the studies of the literary diary, and the works on representations of historical facts and counterfactuality in fiction.
Cognitive Narrative Thematics proposes a new way in which narrative works organise their thematic material. It rehabilitates the study of what books are about by providing a cognitive narrative thematic model (CNT). Part I presents CNT by combining different approaches to narrative, such as evolutionary theory, semiotics, possible worlds theory, or rhetorical criticism. Part II applies CNT to a variety of well-known narratives in different modalities, such as Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess", Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, Frank Miller's 300 or Mike Mignola's Hellboy. It also considers literary histories and digital humanities. Daniel Candel shows that CNT deserves greater attention and that thematics generates its own forms and adds to the aesthetic pleasure of the text. Candel illustrates that CNT improves the established interpretations of the narrative works it studies. This innovative study reveals how CNT offers readers a deeper understanding, and how readers and critics are often using CNT intuitively without being aware of it. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of narrative theory. Daniel Candel is Professor of English literature at the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain. He has published widely in journals such as Poetics Today, Semiotica, English Text Construction and Style.
No matter how traditional the issue of honor crimes may seem, their persistence in present Indian
society marks their contemporality. The marred understanding of the ideologies of honor, fatherhood
and kinship ties fuel the persistence of social institutions like Khap panchayats in Haryana. The
present study looks at the social cultural psychological impacts of social ostracism faced by victims
when their arguments sound completely irrelevant to the preachers of unjust policies of Khap
panchayats. The aim would be to give voice to human condition in such spaces where individual
identities and agencies get curbed in order to save larger social identity. The close analysis of semi
fictional texts Manoj and Babli- A Hate Story and D. R. Chaudhary’s Khap Panchayat and Modern
Age show how the narration of such crimes in contemporary society provide a lonely means of
literary protest to the victims and thereby the need of highlighting the socio cultural crimes
perpetrated on youth in an India that envisions itself as a future world leader. In this context, the
present study aims at analyzing the contentious ideas of righteousness and surveillance embedded
within the discourse of honor crimes in Haryana
I have been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in play-analysis, developmental dramaturgy, adaptation and new play creation for almost two decades. Trained within structural and semiotic approaches to text and performance analysis with emergence of what David Barnett calls “postdramatic theatre texts” (2008:14) and recent calls for decolonizing curriculum, I found myself at a philosophical and theoretical crossroads. This article summarizes my teaching practice and philosophy as inflected through decolonial methods. It argues for our need to teach students to simultaneously position every dramatic text within the critical lens of structural play-analysis and their historical/cultural contextualization or dramaturgical concretization (Vodička 1975). The twenty-first century dramatic texts I teach are often located within the postdramatic European theatre and performance canon (Lehmann 2006), as well as within postcolonial and Indigenous traditions of storytelling. The three plays I chose as my case studies— Arabian Night (2003) by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, Bintou (2002) by Koffi Kwahulé, a Côte d’Ivoire writer living in France, and Burning Vision (2003) by Marie Clements, a Canadian Metis theatre artist—constitute the core of my syllabus for a graduate course in dramaturgy.
This article analyses the katabasis mytheme in Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters (2002) with special emphasis laid on her contemporary revisionist reimagining of The Aeneid. A dialogue with Virgil’s male-centred epic poem becomes both a starting point and a destination when death is just around the corner, intimated and sublimated as it is by London, a city that correlates to the Virgilian Underworld as a dark, damp topos, plagued by grotesque lost souls wandering about its liminal spaces. Therefore this close reading of the trope does not only provide a critical insight into Drabble’s subversive reworking of Aeneas’s descent to the Underworld from a female-centred perspective, but also explores how the mythical resignification of the London urban landscape mediates an ongoing redefinition of women’s old age and its tense power relations with the past, the present and the future.
Cette thèse vise à examiner les romans écrits par Percival Everett au prisme d’un paradigme de l’énigme et des attentes et grilles d’interprétations que ce dernier exige et subvertit pour refuser toute clôture du sens. Une remise en question des formes mêmes du paradigme et de l’abstraction s’ensuit, pour mettre en valeur les lignes de fuite du texte. L’attention que l’énigme convoque de la part du lecteur mène à une réflexion sur la valeur des signes et des manières de les lier, pour mettre en évidence le portrait qu’Everett peint des histoires des États-Unis à travers les mots contractuels et les trahisons enfouies. Différents plans de relations entre les signes interagissent: entre cartographie intertextuelle de textes et de mythes, diffractions du paradigme indiciaire dans la structure narrative, et règles de l’héritage, de la transmission et de la transaction, et des traités rompus qui caractérisent le passé territorial des Etats-Unis. La circulation des signes ouvre dans le texte un espace pour que l’affect se déploie. A travers ces paradigmes subvertis, le corpus touche à des questions quant au potentiel de la littérature en tant que performance d’une parole affective et politique.
En este artículo me ocupo del discurso de don Quijote sobre la Edad de Oro. Se estudia el discurso como un discurso ficticio dentro de una obra ficcional. La utopía contenida en el discurso es explicada como un elemento central del Quijote de Cervantes y el discurso es considerado como un eje activo y dinámico de esta obra. La oposición que hay en el discurso entre el tiempo presente y el tiempo pasado es vista a la vez como estructura social y cultural no solo del discurso, sino también de toda la obra por la activación de la analogía como fundamento de la construcción literaria del Quijote. Las perspectivas y los instrumentos que ofrece la Retórica Cultural se emplean para elucidar la composición del discurso y su papel en la totalidad del texto en el que está inserto. La conciencia de la importancia de las voces de los personajes en el Quijote permite centrarse en el discurso como uno de los principales resultados de la función de las voces en la novela en la construcción del protagonista y como representación de la sociedad. Por ello el discurso de don Quijote sobre la Edad de Oro es un componente imprescindible de la obra.
In this paper, I argue that history is a large-scale transmedia project that is not understood as such, and this causes friction when history is engaged with through media in which historical research is not usually presented. To do this, I go through Henry Jenkins’ ten-step definition of transmedia and argue that history matches the definition very well. This transmedia discussion brings forth the concept of ‘world-building’, in which narrative is superseded by world-building as the all-encompassing concept and as the beginning point of analysis. In the analysis, history (as a product of historiography) is treated as phenomenon instead of a discipline and compared to other forms of transmedia world-building.
Die vorliegende Untersuchung beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung des Mittelalters in sechs deutschsprachigen Jugendromanen der Gegenwartsliteratur, in denen die fremde Epoche innerhalb der Erzählwelt im Rahmen einer Zeitreise erschlossen wird. Die im Phänomen der Zeitreise manifestierte Verräumlichung der Zeit und die in der Jugendliteratur oft erhöhte Bedeutung liminaler Räume greifen ineinander: Der historische Raum wird zum Schwellenraum, der den Jugendlichen Entwicklung und Identitätssuche ermöglicht. Auch Kultur und Gesellschaft sind in der Adoleszenz Konzepte von zentraler Bedeutung, da die Auseinandersetzung mit der Erwachsenenwelt die Entwicklung von Individualität und Geschlechtsbildern nach sich zieht. Die phantastische Metapher einer Reise durch die Zeit, in der sich Zeit und Raum verknüpfen und damit einen neuen Kulturraum zur Entwicklung bieten, eröffnet so eine Vielzahl von erzählerischen Möglichkeiten für die in der Jugendliteratur zentralen Themen von Weiterentwicklung und Selbstfindung.
Twentieth-century drama has made the stage a site for reflecting on science. Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, considered by many as one of the most striking contributions to “science plays,” portrays the elusive yet crucial short meeting of the two pillars of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in the autumn of 1941. The play employs ‘real’ scientists as characters that recurrently refer to and explain their scientific ideas such as uncertainty and complementarity, recognized as the Copenhagen Interpretation. Adopting the approach of possible worlds theory, this article analyses the concept of ‘possible worlds’ as projected in Copenhagen in light of the idea that physics itself has proposed a proliferation of parallel universes (multiverse). In fact, our main thesis is that the play offers an alternate history and brings about a myriad of counterfactuals that are tested as “drafts.”
A obra ficcional de Herculano Marcos Inglês de Sousa tem sido lida a partir da perspectiva mimética platônica: a “imitação da realidade”. Os trabalhos acadêmicos interpretativos têm focalizado, sem atentar para a natureza ficcional das narrativas inglesianas, o material sociológico e político em detrimento da invenção ficcional. Para além dessas referências interpretativas, propomos uma investigação narratológica que reafirma a invenção fictícia dos Contos Amazônicos (1893), por meio das categorias do tipo de narrador e a presença do destinatário fictício (SCHMID, 2010). Considerando essas ferramentas teóricas, afirmamos outra posição mimética que, segundo Aristóteles, explora tanto sua capacidade de “representação da realidade” quanto o caráter “cognitivo da ficção”. O mundo amazônico presente na obra literária inglesiana poderá assim assumir completa autonomia como “mundo narrado” e artefato estético dispensando a identificação com a história e superando a fronteira entre a narrativa factual e a narrativa ficcional (DOLEZEL, 1998).
The anachronistic character of the loving relationship between Dido and Aeneas was widely and commonly discussed among commentators, critics, and writers in the early modern period. From the 16th century onwards, when the word »anachronism« appeared in vernacular languages, its definition was even inseparable from the example borrowed from the Aeneid . The purpose of this article is to interrelate early modern debates on anachronism, reflections on the status of fiction and the history of fiction.
Starting with the hypothesis that anachronism is a form of counterfactual, the questions posed in this article are: did forms of counterfactuals exist before the 19th century, to what extent did they differ from contemporary alternative histories and, if so, why? The story of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid can be considered »counterfactual«, because this version of the narrative about the queen of Carthage was opposed to another, which was considered to be historical and which made Dido a privileged embodiment of female virtue and value.
Several important shifts are highlighted in this article. With the exception of St. Augustine (who saw in Vergil’s anachronism confirmation of the inanity of fiction), before the 16th century indifference towards anachronism prevailed: the two versions of Dido’s story were often juxtaposed or combined. If Vergil’s version of Dido’s story was condemned, it was for moral reasons: the exemplary version, considered more historically accurate, was favored throughout the Middle Ages, notably by Petrarch and Boccaccio.
From the 16th century onwards, however, increased acquaintance with Aristotle’s Poetics promoted greater demand for rationality and plausibility in fables. This coincided with the appearance of the word »chronology« and its development, which led to a new understanding of historical time. Anachronism then appeared to be a fault against verisimilitude, and as such was strongly condemned, for example by the commentator on Aristotle, Lodovico Castelvetro. At the same time, the argument of poetic license was also often invoked: it actually became the most common position on this issue. Vergil’s literary canonization, moreover, meant that the version of Dido’s life in the Aeneid was the only story that was known and cited, and from the 17th century onwards it totally supplanted the exemplary version. Strangely enough, permissiveness towards anachronism in treatises, prefaces, or comments on literary works was not accompanied by any development of counterfactual literature in early modern period. Indeed, in both narrative and theatrical genres fiction owed its development and legitimization to the triumph of the criterion of plausibility.
This article, however, discusses several examples that illustrate how the affirmation of fiction in the early modern period was expressed through minor variations on anachronism: the counterfictional form of Ronsard’s epic, La Franciade , which represents an explicit deviation from the Iliad ; the metaleptic meeting of Vergil and Dido in the Underworld in Fontenelle’s Le dialogue des morts ; and the provocative proposal for a completely different version of Dido’s life, which was made in an early 17th century Venetian operatic work by an author who claimed to be anti-Aristotelian. This study thus intends to provide an aspect of the story of fiction. The change of perspective on anachronism marks a retreat from moral argument, with privilege given to aesthetic criteria and relative independence with regard to history – while still moderated by the criterion of verisimilitude, as underlined by the abbé d’Aubignac, as well as Corneille.
The type of historical fiction discussed in this book is “literary” rather than “popular” in depicting historical loss without remedy. Theorists of historical fiction have focused on its political content or self-reflexive form; recent critical approaches to contemporary historical fiction have analyzed form rather than content. Distinctive content in this type of historical fiction includes political readings of historical events, criticism of global capitalism, and commitments to the collective and the subaltern. In form, plural viewpoints and empathy replace omniscience. Contrasts between recent trilogies by Hilary Mantel and Amitav Ghosh establish differences between recovering positive heroic legacies in history and representing wreckage. Mantel’s trilogy recovers the origins of modern British democracy, while Ghosh’s represents the catastrophic opium trade with its devastations of subaltern lives.
The first two sections of this chapter provide an overview of the history boom in contemporary fiction and sketch its historical background, in order to bring out the relations of this boom with 9/11 and its concomitant apocalyptic imagery. In terms of the literary history of the historical novel, the post-9/11 historical novels reflect continuity, as they share, to varying degrees, the characteristics that many of the historical novels of the 1990s have manifested: telling truth as a literary testimony, blending the author’s auto/biographical elements into the fiction, a catastrophic backdrop, and taking a transnational and multicultural perspective. Along with the second coming of historical fiction, alternate history fiction flourished as a literary genre in the 1990s and since then, has stylistically become increasingly more realistic while contemplating on the importance of historical events and human agency in making history. Pointing out some limitations in current genre studies, the last section complements them with memory studies to offer perceptive insights into the effect of genre on the construction of memory and the role that the emergent present plays in both the writer’s and the reader’s remembering and making sense of the past through literary representations.
This article explores representations of history and history for the present in Fallout 4 to illuminate how the gameworld makes clever use of common historical tropes and aesthetics, as well as the genre of the counterfactual in its presentation of a compelling and interactive narrative. Set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Massachusetts, Fallout 4 employs various sites of historical Massachusetts (Concord, Lexington, Boston) in order to draw the user into the story of the ‘lone survivor,’ the avatar that he or she takes control of. This analysis is interested in the ways that Fallout 4 employs history and the genre of the counterfactual in the production of a compelling narrative that not only invites but impels the player into action to chart a new course for this devastated virtual landscape. The power of counterfactual history lies in its capacity to unravel assumptions about the static nature of historical events, and in its denial of a linear trajectory of history broadly. In the case of Fallout 4, the implementation of a counterfactual story, wherein the nuclear event that shrouded the Cold War period in uncertainty, takes place. It serves as a rejection of the popularly rehearsed narrative of American supremacy triumphing over Communist forces to present the player with a more nuanced interpretation of some of the internal and external tensions that came to define the Cold War period (i.e. cultural malaise, economic instability, the growth of a military-industrial complex). This conflicting presentation of histories both real and imagined provides an opportunity for the player to experience and interact with the game critically as a counterfactual reimagining of the Cold War era. Viewed in this way, the virtual world of Fallout 4 becomes a space where the player can reassess their own understanding of the period, and the nature of historical knowledge production more broadly.
Cette thèse apporte un éclairage esthétique sur un ensemble de romans polyphoniques du canon francophone contemporain. Des formes de féminisme autour du prophète de l’islam dans Loin de Médine d'Assia Djebar aux formes de l’individualisme dans un village guadeloupéen dans Traversée de la mangrove de Maryse Condé en passant par les voix multiples de la créolité dans Solibo Magnifique de Patrick Chamoiseau, ces romans sont engagés dans des stratégies littéraires novatrices. Or les études postcoloniales ont laissé dans l'ombre le travail des formes qui est pourtant le mode opératoire de la pensée littéraire. Il faut donc remédier à ces lacunes par une analyse narratologique et stylistique des techniques de représentation du discours et de la pensée. En dégageant les formes et les enjeux de la relation fascinante qui se joue entre la parole de l’autre et les voix narratives, notre thèse apporte une contribution attendue dans les études francophones autant que dans les théories narratives.Trois pensées majeures nourrissent cette recherche : d’abord le concept de contrepoint d’Edward Saïd, envisagé dans sa dimension dialogique, ensuite la vision sociale du langage chez Voloshinov/Bakhtine qui préside aux développements sur le dialogisme, enfin l’approche politique de la littérature de Jacques Rancière, qui donne un tout nouvel éclairage aux désormais traditionnels bénéfices de l’« estrangement ». C’est ainsi sans quitter la zone ténue où se rencontrent formes esthétiques et formes sociales que ce travail traverse les débats les plus actuels des études francophones.
Historical fiction has gained a degree of popularity among readers in the last two decades it has not enjoyed since the fashion for writing novels about national history was set by Sir Walter Scott in the early 19th century. Later in that same century, however, the value of historical fiction as such was challenged by historians who were eager to make history a science, they claimed that academic historical writing provided an objective view of the past based on archival research and was therefore fundamentally superior to historical novels. A devaluation of historical fiction took place which is still felt today. In the context of this opposition of history and fiction, Emma Donoghue's recent historical fiction offers a fresh approach to the genre. The aim of this article, after reviewing the issue of its relationship to history, is to analyze Donoghue's innovative combination of fiction and the archive in two collections of short historical fiction, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Astray (2012). Donoghue's own reflections on her work are applied in this analysis, as well as the theoretical approach to this kind of fiction by Lubomir Dolezel.
This work is a critical introduction to Alfred Schutz’s sociology of the multiple reality and an enterprise that seeks to reassess and reconstruct the Schutzian project. In the first part of the study, I inquire into Schutz’s biographical con- text that surrounds the germination of this conception and I analyse the main texts of Schutz where he has dealt directly with ‘finite provinces of meaning.’ On the basis of this analysis, I suggest and discuss, in Part II, several solutions to the shortcomings of the theoretical system that Schutz drew upon the sociological problem of multiple reality. Specifically, I discuss problems related to the struc- ture, the dynamics, and the interrelationing of finite provinces of meaning as well as the way they relate to the questions of narrativity, experience, space, time, and identity.
How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Albert Camus and Alejo Carpentier, this book explores the racial politics of literary form. "Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel" contributes to the emergent attention in literary studies to the interrelation of form and politics, which has been underexplored in narrative theory and comparative racial studies. Bridging cultural, postcolonial, racial studies and narratology, this book brings context specificity and awareness to the production of ideological, ambivalent narrative texts that, through technical innovation in narrative reliability, deeply engage with extremely violent episodes of colonial origin in the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, and the French and Spanish Caribbean. In this manner, the book reformulates and expands the problem of narrative reliability, and highlights the key uses and production of racial discourses so as to reveal the participation of experimental novels in early and mid-20th century racial conflicts, which function as a test case to display a broad, new area of study in cultural and political narrative theory.
https://www.routledge.com/Narrative-Reliability-Racial-Conflicts-and-Ideology-in-the-Modern-Novel/Puxan-Oliva/p/book/9780367140878
Through the poststructuralist interdisciplinary adaptations of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a plethora of ontological literary theories have been developed as the cognitive studies of the minds of the authors, readers and characters in terms of “state of affairs,” “game of make believe,” “cross-world identity,” and “accessibility relations.” Marie Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory suggests a “world semantics” typology of possible worlds following “the logic of parallelism” for examining the self-referentiality of the mentally constructed possible worlds of the characters in the fictional narrative universe. However, the present study examines the extra-textual referentiality of these worlds to the Lacanian “Real” in the contexts of the psychoanalytic Marxism of Fredric Jameson and his theory on the linguistic unconscious of late capitalism. Accordingly, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as a set of qualitatively parsimonious spatial entities, are Marco’s allegorical projections of the postmodern “social space,” “heterotopian sites” and “dystopian spaces” of his knowledge, obligation and wish worlds.
This book offers a theoretical investigation into the general problem of reality as a multiplicity of ‘finite provinces of meaning’, as developed in the work of Alfred Schutz. A critical introduction to Schutz’s sociology of multiple realities as well as a sympathetic re-reading and reconstruction of his project, Experiencing Multiple Realities traces the genesis and implications of this concept in Schutz’s writings before presenting an analysis of various ways in which it can shed light on major sociological problems, such as social action, social time, social space, identity, or narrativity.
This article analyzes Mario Vargas Llosa’s fictional reconstruction of Flora Tristán, taking into account a variety of 19 th –and 20 th – century historical and literary rearticulations. Unlike other writings on the famous Franco-Peruvian author, Vargas Llosa’s El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) articulates a possible and coherent world from an alternative and dissident perspective, without the religiosity, nationalist passion, and paternalistic attitude that we find in other works on Flora Tristán, the intellectual who fought for a socialist utopia of equality for women and the oppressed workers. In order to carry out this historical reconstruction, the critic analyzes Flora Tristán’s feminist fabrication in Vargas Llosa’s novel, in view of his own essays in regards to the world of fiction and the political power of literature | Este artículo analiza la reconstrucción ficcional que Mario Vargas Llosa realiza de Flora Tristán, tomando en cuenta diversas rearticulaciones histórico-literarias de los siglos XIX y XX. A diferencia de otras escrituras con respecto a la famosa escritora franco-peruana, la de Vargas Llosa en El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) articula un mundo posible y coherente desde una perspectiva alternativa y disidente, sin la religiosidad, el fervor nacionalista o la actitud paternalista que hallamos en otros trabajos sobre Flora Tristán, la intelectual que luchó por alcanzar una utopía socialista de igualdad para las mujeres y los obreros oprimidos. Para realizar este análisis de reconstrucción histórica, el crítico analiza el ensamblaje feminista de Flora Tristán en la novela de Vargas Llosa, a la luz de varios de sus ensayos con respecto al mundo de la ficción y el poder político de la literatura.
The present article studies eight of the twelve reports of the Stanford Literary Lab (SLL) to understand why the revolutionary practices of the lab, and by extension of the digital humanities, have not yet changed literary history, as the lab itself admits. The article examines the reports with two related cultural-semantic tools, each of which is introduced via the Pixar movie Brave. First, the interpretations of the reports are placed within a basic semantic grid organized into four quadrants by a nature-society axis and a past-present axis, which shows that the interpretations are invariably situated in the present-society quadrant. This analysis, while necessary, merely proves that SLL operates within a certain cultural climate. The real test lies in ascertaining whether this cultural climate affects the interpretation of novel data. To do so, the article looks for the reaction of SLL to novel data in two reports. The reports are shown to domesticate novelty by explaining it through standard alethic/deontic patterns, even though the data are novel precisely because the patterns largely fail to explain them. The article closes by asking whether such patterns limit or enable thinking and what this means for the digital humanities.
Truthlikeness in historiography would allow us to be optimistic fallible realists about historiography – to hold that historical knowledge is about the past, true albeit fallible, and can increase over time. In this paper, three desiderata for a concept of truthlikeness in historiography will be outlined. One of the main challenges for truthlikeness is historiographic skepticism which holds that historiography is indistinguishable from fiction and cannot therefore furnish us with true knowledge about the past. Such skepticism rests on the postmodern challenge, which will be criticized on the grounds that it rests on an implausible theory of meaning. It will be shown that Peirce’s semeiotic and pragmatist theory of truth, interpreted dialogically or game-theoretically, provides a suitable framework within which to pursue the project of defining a concept of truthlikeness for historiography. Finally, directions for possible future research into truthlikeness in historiography, including ways of defining a measure of truthlikeness, will be considered.
Crusher of Grits: S. Y. Agnon’s Alternative History
(“In Search of a Rabbi, or The Spirit of the Ruler”)
In this article, alternative history has been regarded not as a postmodern genre of Since Fiction, but as a universal mode of thinking and storytelling. Its research is especially effective in discussion of historical-mythical pseudo-chronicles of lost civilizations, such as Agnon’s Ir u-mloa – his Holocaust opus magnum. The article is devoted to the story from this volume “In Search of a Rabbi, or The Spirit of the Ruler” (“Ha-mekhapsim lahem rav, o be-ruakh ha-moshel”). The method enables to discern the author’s complex historical and historiographical conceptions, which have been hidden in plots and characters, as well as in symbols of historical alternativeness, such as “Crusher of Grits” (“kotesh grisin”).
http://www.academicstudiespress.com/browse-catalog/nostalgia-for-a-foreign-land?rq=katsman
As the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable than the oppositions of content might suggest.
Literary theory should tell us something about literature and the world. Literature and literary theory are part of a social and cultural context and are ways of seeing and knowing. Humans, and this author, being so often blind, it is important to use as many tools to try to understand and know. One word for this multiplicity of options might be pluralism, although there are simpler ways of saying that many tools are better than one tool in most instances.
Somewhere between possibility and probability, the measure of time finds its expression in fictional and historical works. The relation between the ideal and the real, the imagined and the actual, is played out in the world and becomes less distinctive in the borderlands between fiction and history. Writer and reader enact the drama of meaning in historical and fictional texts, and both try to represent or imagine a past based on what seems to make sense, from what happened in history and from the premises of the imagined world in fiction. Historical fiction, like Shakespeare’s history plays, tests the boundaries between fiction and history. In doing so, such texts tell us about the function of narrative and drama in the theatre of the world and about the worldliness of fictional texts. The power of Shakespeare’s language and political theatre are memorable and reinforce Cicero’s sense of history, so that his history tends to be experienced more in subsequent periods than that of John Stow, William Camden, Edward Hall, or Raphael Holinshed.1 All their work, including the historical fictions of Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Daniel, and Ben Jonson, help to round out an Elizabethan sense of the past or of making the past present. This is but one point of view and node of historical interpretation even within English historiography let alone that of other historiographies in this period and does not even go into changes over time.
As Arjun Appadurai notes, in today’s post-exilic globalized world the experience of exile and migration has become the norm of the social habitat: the age of globalization rests upon cultivating a sense of people’s mobility and thus it reinforces the state of displacement as its major distinctive quality. “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation,” Appadurai writes. “This is not to suggest that thought alone will carry us beyond the nation or that the nation is largely a thought or imagined thing. Rather, it is to suggest that the role of intellectual practices is to identify the current crisis of the nation and, in identifying it, to provide part of the apparatus of recognition for postnational social forms” (Appadurai, “Patriotism and its Futures”, 411). Accordingly, today it is the experience of exile that teaches one the lessons of postnational condition, global citizenship, transnational lifestyle, or better cosmopolitan reality (Appadurai, “Patriotism and its Futures”; Agamben, Means Without End; Simpson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitanism”; and Rebellato, Theatre & Globalization; among others). This reality forces one to reconsider the aesthetics of the exilic performative as rooted within the unresolvable tension between 1) the exilic artist’s highly personalized, idiosyncratic discourse, marked by this artist’s particular exilic experience, cultural referents, linguistic means, and the chosen mode of artistic expression, and 2) the same artist’s search for the language of his/her expression comprehensible for a wide range of international audiences, if not all people of the world.
Aiming to underline the link between storytelling content and ritual structure and to show how the building of community constitutes the meta-theme of storytelling in general and film narrative in particular, L. A. Alexander explores the notion of symbolic community and provides a detailed account of narrative (film) genres in terms of three parameters–their origin in a basic ritual, the cultural need they address, and the cultural function they fulfill–as well as sets of rules for the successful creation of fictional worlds. Though it does not pay much attention to such important narrational elements as distance, speed, and point of view, Alexander’s exploration sheds decisive light on the foundations, characteristics, and possibilities of fictional worlds represented in (film) narratives.
Based on Hayden White’s work, this article suggests that history and the novel share a number of features that make both disciplines branches of literature. Beyond the referential intention of both discourses, the article attempts to stress the linguistic, literary and narrative component of the two activities, highlighting the relevance of the term “historical literature”, next to “novelistic literature.” To illustrate this approach, it examines two postmodern historiographical experiments that exemplify the dialogue between the two disciplines: literary novelistic techniques and historiographical literary techniques. The two historiographical postmodern experiments studied here are Mirror in the Shrine, by Robert Rosenstone, and Stories of Scottsboro, by James Goodman.
The aim of this article is to examine how the biographical material that Janice Kulyk Keefer “steals” from Mansfield’s life is used to re-create a “quasi-real” life in a novel which absorbs reality, digests it, and offers an oxymoronic, semi-fictitious product: a biofiction. Keefer selected biographèmes or kernels of truth on which her fictitious details and characters could be grafted: following Mansfield’s physical, emotional and intellectual trail was an imperative part of Keefer’s research plan, as essential as close reading of the modernist author’s letters and journals. Besides seamlessly fusing reality and fiction, historical and imaginative truths, these hybrid products bring together the characteristics of literary and genre fiction. The article also focuses on the generic aspect of Thieves, which “sells” a scholarly literary background by using a commercial format that borrows features from popular genres such as love stories, thrillers, mystery and detective novels. The result is a multi-layered story endowed with great narrative virtuosity and variety, with leaps in time and space and with parallel stories that finally intersect. The article ultimately concludes with more general considerations on how such biofictions recreating the myth of iconic figures have proved to be a flourishing literary genre on the current book market. This article was submitted to the EJLW on 28 November 2013 and published on 14 October 2014.
A cultura galega continúa viva, e a súa literatura tamén. A obra de
don Xosé Neira Vilas é un bo exemplo. Foi para nós unha grande honra
ter a oportunidade de coñecer a don Xosé Neira Vilas. O motivo foi un
Curso de Extensión Universitaria que se desenvolveu na Aula UNED
de Lalín, UNED de Pontevedra, a finais de abril de 2010. O curso titulábase
do mesmo xeito que este libro que temos o gusto de coordinar:
Xosé Neira Vilas. Da Galicia de Balbino á Galicia de hoxe.
Os motivos para levar a cabo o curso ou xornadas foron os seguintes.
O primeiro, cumpríanse cincuenta anos da publicación de Memorias
dun neno labrego. Era, por tanto, un bo momento para homenaxear ao
autor, Xosé Neira Vilas, e á súa obra. Os personaxes que construen os
autores dependen sempre de quen os pensou e narrou. As narrativas
fanas os autores, non os personaxes que éstes inventaron. Primeiro é o
autor, no noso caso don Xosé, e despois a súa creación literaria, Balbino.
Dicimos isto porque en ocasións parece, erradamente, que foi Balbino
quen inventou a don Xosé Neira Vilas. A nos interésanos, en primeiro
lugar, o autor, e secundariamente o protagonista de Memorias dun neno
labrego. A nosa homenaxe non é a Balbino, senón a Neira Vilas.
O segundo, sen dúbida, entrar en contacto cunha das persoas máis
sobranceiras da nosa cultura contemporánea, autor de éxito, non só
para a crítica, senón de público. Así o demostran os preto de seiscentos
mil exemplares vendidos, en numerosos idiomas, de Memorias dun
neno labrego dende a publicación da súa primeira edición alá por 1961.
Quizáis sexa o libro galego de maior difusión de todos os tempos. O
seu éxito para nós débese a que xenera unha empatía cos lectores, que se
identifican co sinxelo estilo narrativo do personaxe principal, Balbino.
O terceiro, porque unha vez superado o positivo impacto emocional
que para nós supuña coñecer a un mito da nosa nenez, ao creador
de Balbino, Lelo, Moncho e tantos outros personaxes que limos con
avidez na nosa infancia, era descubrir, valorar e comprender á persoa,
don Xosé. Trátase dun home amable no trato, entrañable no contacto
persoal, ameno contador de historias, cordial no diálogo, traballador
incesante, e sempre disposto a acudir alá a donde o inviten. Sempre
estivo disposto a axudar na boa consecución tanto do curso, como do
libro que o lector ten nas mans.
O cuarto aspecto a ter en conta é a relevancia histórica, antropolóxica
e de psicoloxía cultural da obra de don Xosé Neira Vilas. Cando nos
puxemos en contacto con el para pedirlle permiso para facer un curso
de homenaxe á súa persoa e á súa obra, e pregarlle que asistise á inauguración,
mostrouse disposto non só a colaborar, senón a estar presente en
todas as conferencias das Xornadas. E así o fixo. Foi realmente a alma
do encontro, comentando, debatendo e aportando todo aquelo que
xulgaba pertinente en cada unha das intervencións que houbo durante
o curso. Resultou unha experiencia moi enriquecedora para todos. E
tamén constituíu unha mostra da súa grandeza como escritor, da súa
calidade como persoa, e da súa sabiduría do pasado e do presente de
galeguismo e da cultura galega. El é un dos grandes da literatura galega,
que contribuíu coa súa obra a alimentar as mentes de miles e miles de
persoas, nenos e non tan nenos.
E, por último e quinto lugar, conseguir xuntar baixo o lema do encontro
a toda unha serie de especialistas en diferentes ámbitos das humanidades
e das ciencias sociais. Entre todos aportaron unha visión
amplía e interdisciplinar da evolución da nosa terra dende a época na
que se desenvolven os feitos narrados en Memorias, medio imaxinarios
e medio reais, e o período actual de principios do século vinteún. Poderiamos
afirmar que se logrou dar conta do cambio social que aconteceu
en Galicia ao longo do século XX; cambio que supuxo abandonar as
vellas estruturas agrarias e, solo en certas ocasións, as mentais que caracterizaban
o país ata transformarse no que é hoxe, un territorio urbano
rexido por lóxicas urbanas, cunha clara dicotomía económica e demográfica
entre o terzo occidental e o resto do país.
Así, ao longo do presente texto, o lector poderá coñecer a evolución
da obra literaria de Neira Vilas. Do mesmo xeito, comprobar tamén
cómo era a emigración cara os mesmos destinos que seguiu o escritor;
cómo era a psicoloxía da sociedade rural daquel momento; cómo cambiou
o rural galego nos aspectos antropolóxicos, psicolóxicos, económicos
e territoriais; cómo evolucionaron os comportamentos relixiosos e a
propia sociedade rural; e, por último, cómo se modificou a demografía
galega ou mesmo cómo aconteceron estes mesmos aspectos no conxunto
do Estado.
Estamos, por tanto, diante dunha obra interdisciplinar que cremos
sumamente interesante para entender o cambio das estruturas sociais,
culturais, económicas, psicolóxicas, productivas e de organización territorial
de Galicia ao longo do século XX e ata a actualidade.
Nunha introdución coma esta non podemos esquecer o agradecemento
aos especialistas que participaron no curso, sen eles e sen as súas
achegas non tería sido posible publicar este libro. Tamén, e moi especialmente,
debemos agradecer á dirección do Centro Asociado da UNED
de Pontevedra o apoio para levar adiante o curso, e especialmente á súa
directora dona Beatriz Rodríguez López e á profesora dona María José
Manzanares Perela, Coordinadora de Extensión Universitaria e Prácticum
do Centro Asociado da UNED de Pontevedra. Á directora do curso,
a profesora da UNED de Madrid, dona Pilar González Yanci, quen
levou a cabo todos os trámites necesarios na Sede Central da UNED
en Madrid. Ao Concello de Lalín, a través de seu Alcalde, don Xosé
Crespo Iglesias, patrocinando o curso. O noso recoñecemento tamén
a don Román Rodríguez González, concelleiro do Concello de Lalín,
quen se implicou moi seriamente para que se puidese sacar adiante con
éxito o curso e a publicación das actas. Asimesmo, cómpre mencionar,
de xeito moi especial e agarimoso, tanto a Paco como a Carmen Lareo.
O primeiro, pola súa excepcional achega coa evocación da imaxe de
Neira Vilas que foi o cartel anunciador do Curso, e que tamén serve de
portada ao libro. Á segunda, pola súa colaboración e valiosa axuda na
posta en marcha do curso e no seu correcto desenvolvemento.
O patrocinio correu a cargo, ademais do Concello de Lalín e da
UNED, da Consellería de Educación de Xunta de Galicia. Cómpre
agradecer ao seu titular don Xesús Vázquez Abad a súa disposición a
contribuír á realización do curso, ao igual que o fixo o Director Xeral
de Promoción e Difusión Cultural, Francisco López Rodríguez. E, fi-
nalmente, tamén o noso agradecemento á Deputación de Pontevedra,
ao seu presidente, don Rafael Louzán Abal, e ao responsable da área de
Cultura, o vicepresidente don José Juan Durán, polo seu interese na
homenaxe a don Xosé Neira Vilas e na publicación desta obra. A todos,
moitas grazas, e no noso agradecemento e recoñecemento pola promoción
de temas relacionados coa cultura galega.
Etgar Keret (b. 1967) is undoubtedly one of the most popular recent Hebrew writers. However, among critics, there is no unanimity as to the qualities of his oeuvre, both poetic and ideological. In this article, I suggest a new key for understanding Keret's writing and thinking—the concept of a minimal metaphysical origin. The out-of-date and unfashionable thinking of origin reestablishes the human in the allegedly “posthuman” era. The minimalism of the origin refers neither to the measures of Keret's stories nor to his language, but to the main feature of his poetic thinking: constitution of the whole human condition on the infinitely small but inexhaustible originary scene. This scene is further presented as a source of historical alternativeness. I view alternative history as a metaphysical–personalistic counterbalance to both radical determinism and relativism, and as a minimal metaphysical response to the tragic bewilderment in the face of life and history, when a bifurcation point (the significant center of alternativeness) is the minimal metaphysical origin.
The first part of this paper argues for four principal conclusions 1.(1) Typically, formal inferences in fiction do not differ from those of ordinary quantification theory.2.(2) Material inferences, based on laws of physics or psychology, for example, vary from one work of fiction to another, and determining which are valid is part of determining which genre the work belongs to.3.(3) The semantics of fiction is inherently incomplete; the law of bivalence is not valid for fictional worlds.4.(4) Fictional worlds may be inconsistent.The second part of the paper attempts a mating of Routley and Meyer's dialectical logic with van Fraassen's notion of supervaluations to yield a logic of fiction with the characteristics required by the first part of the paper. The paper concludes with some suggestions concerning reference actoss the boundaries of fictional worlds and the real world.
This article attempts to clarify Derrida's notion of écriture and to show, through a close reading of three lectures on literary figures (Valéry, Ponge, Joyce), how he puts theory into practice. Saussure thought that linguistics would be a branch of semiology, a general theory of signs and signification. His conventional logocentric privileging of speaking over writing was the initial step on the road that made phonology the dominant discipline within the science. Linguists and philosophers have trivialized, ignored, and repressed the other epistemological path, that of grammatology. Derrida's field of analytical inquiry (the signing of signs or 'signs' as both noun and verb), includes semiology in an even more general theory of signifying practices (oral communication, mathematics, painting, philosophy, history, literature, etc), since writing and the written are the conditions of their very existence. They all depend on inscription because cultural transmission requires repeatability, duplication, reproducibility, etc. Yet without writing spoken language could not be described and linguistics would not exist. Neither would 'culture' in general.
This article, a defense of realism and representationalism in history against the postmodernist philosophy of language, is a critical rejoinder to Keith Jenkins's reply to my earlier essay in this journal in 1999 on postmodernism and historiography. Beginning with some remarks on the relationship between philosophy and historiography, this article goes on to note some of the weaknesses in postmodernist Jenkins's discussion of realism, representationalism, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida's well-known dictum that there is nothing outside the text. It also considers Jenkins's talk about emancipation and the end of history and shows why it cannot be taken seriously. The article's conclusion is that postmodernism has nothing to contribute to the understanding of history as a form of thought or body of knowledge.
Philosophers and historians have long been suspicious of modal and counterfactual claims. I argue, however, that historians often legitimately use modal and counterfactual claims for a variety of purposes. They help identify causes, and hence help explain events in history. They are used to defend judgments about people, and to highlight the importance of particular events. I defend these uses of modal claims against two arguments often used to criticize modal reasoning, using the philosophy of science to ground the truth of modal claims. This analysis puts several important points into perspective, including how certain we can be about our claims about what might have been, and the role that determinism plays in those claims. The proper analysis of modality shows, I argue, that counterfactual claims are legitimate and important, if often uncertain, and that issues of determinism are irrelevant to the modal claims used in historical analysis.
Evaluation of the influence of Hayden White on the theory of history ismade difficult by his preference for the essay form, valued for its experimental character, and by the need to find comparable data. A quantitative study of citations of his work in English and foreign-language journals, 1973–1993, reveals that although historians were prominent among early readers of Metahistory, few historical journals reviewed White'stwo subsequent collections of essays and few historians—except inGermany—cited them. Those historians who did tended still to cite Metahistory and often the parts of it devoted specifically to nineteenth-century historians.
Literary critics, on the other hand, were relatively late to discover White, but during the “narrative turn” of the 1970s and 1980s his work was important for students of the novel and the theater. Recognition of it was especially marked in Spanish-speaking countries and in Germany.
As a result, salient themes of White's later work—the ideological andpolitical import of narrativization, the “historical sublime,” and writing in the “middle voice”—have largely gone unremarked by historians and philosophers. Both these groups have tended to be irritated by White's bracketing of questions of historical epistemology; some have accused him of effacing the line between fiction and history, while White's numerous literary readers have generally applauded his tendencies in thisdirection. White however has consistently maintained that there is a difference, although not the one conventionally postulated. His exploration of writing in the “middle voice” brings his work full circle, in that it promises a “modernist” realism appropriate for representing the “sublime” events of our century.
If, as many historians and theorists now believe, narrative is the formproper to historical explanation, this raises the problem of the terms in which such narratives areto be evaluated. Without a clear account of evaluation, the status of historical knowledge (both initself and in all those social, political, and other contexts in which appeal to historical explanationis made) remains obscure. Beginning with the view, found in Hayden White and others, thathistorical narrative constitutes a meaning not reducible to the factual content it engages, thisessay argues that such meaning can arise only through a synthesis of cognitive and normativediscourses. Narrative combines “heterogeneous” language games in such a waythat neither appeal to “truth content” nor to “justice” suffices todecide the question of which of two competing historical explanations is, as a whole, superior.Examining in critical detail the opposed positions on this issue articulated by two recenttheorists—Frank Ankersmit (“narrative idealism”) and David Carr(“narrative realism”)—the paper concludes that the debate between thosewho hold that historical narratives should be judged in essentially cognitive terms and those whohold that they should be judged in essentially political terms cannot be resolved and that aphilosophical view of historical narrative that is neither realist nor idealist needs to be developed.
Die Gleichheit fordert das Nachdenken heraus durch Fragen, die sich daran knüpfen und nicht ganz leicht zu beantworten sind. Ist sie eine Beziehung? eine Beziehung zwischen Gegenständen? oder zwischen Namen oder Zeichen für Gegenstände? Das letzte hatte ich in meiner Begriffsschrift angenommen. Die Gründe, die dafür zu sprechen scheinen, sind folgende: a=a und a=b sind offenbar Sätze von verschiedenem Erkenntniswerte: a=a gilt a priori und ist nach Kant analytisch zu nennen, während Sätze von der Form a=b oft sehr wertvolle Erweiterungen unserer Erkenntnis enthalten und a priori nicht immer zu begründen sind. Die Entdeckung, daß nicht jeden Morgen eine neue Sonne aufgeht, sondern immer dieselbe, ist wohl eine der folgenreichsten in der Astronomie gewesen. Noch jetzt ist die Wiedererkennung eines kleinen Planeten oder eines Kometen nicht immer etwas Selbstverständliches.