Narrativity in History

Post-Structuralism and Since

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7797019
AutoresHans Kellner (0000-0003-0511-7454, autor de correspondencia)
Año1987
Volumen26
Número4
Páginas1
Fecha de publicación1987-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2505042
OpenAlexW2328166622
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas42
Referencias citadas1

Recent debates among historians on narrative often suggest that what is at issue is a simple decision: should the historian tell a story (that is, narrate his material in a chronological, cause-effect way), or not? To choose not to tell a story is to be more modern, following the social and economic sciences in presenting synchronic, and quantitative if possible, models of past affairs. New historical methods and recently explored kinds of documentation often deal with the general and the mass, rather than the particular and the individual; modelled on computers and lacking in events, this new which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, established the basis for a non-narrative history that challenged the traditional core of historical knowledge. Even the turn to storytelling by certain prominent non-narrative historians only served to mark the distinction; tales of personal life in heretical medieval villages, or of returning husbands with uncertain identities, were distinctly different from the earlier work of these historians. The stories seemed to be luxury articles, earned as indulgences after the drudgery of economic, social, climatological, family, and demographic history. Indeed, the stories were often by-products of such research. During the same period of time, roughly the twenty years from 1965 to 1985, another movement of thought emerged, which looked at forms of knowledge from quite an opposite perspective. While historians were confidently processing larger and larger quantities of information, producing broader comparisons and wider conclusions, and in general extending the historical domain toward a goal of a total history, the counter-movement sought, like Penelope, to unravel the weaving of texts and to question wherever possible both the meaning and the tactics and conditions which made meaning possible in written texts of all sorts. History was for some of them a special target; they considered it both dependent upon and reinforcing the oppressive and inescapable atmosphere of humanism. Both movements, at first, found their theoretical inspiration in France; both found essential, practical support in the large and varied world of American academia. The post-war Annales school of historians has by now seen three generations, each with its own style and interests. The movements once marked as structuralist have similarly changed and developed to such an extent that the term post-structuralist is conventionally used in the United States at least

Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Narrativity · Post structuralism · Structuralism (philosophy of science) · Data Analysis and Archiving · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography