The Expense of Many A Vanished Sight”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10065249 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R J Kaufmann (0009-0001-6501-1275, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1964 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 6-22 |
| Publication date | 1964-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/385489 |
| OpenAlex | W2017544530 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
“ In normal times the guillotine, luckily, is not at the disposal of historians .” Paul Valéry History is a humanly necessary mode of knowing. Every poised epoch is knit together by the imaginative language it uses to expropriate an organized past from whose qualitative contours it then silently, habitually infers its own nature. History as a fact of communal psychology thus maintains a many-layered referential manifold. This referential manifold must have some kind of emotional legibility and be formally intelligible if it is to serve to subordinate the threatening welter of the no longer relevant. A great deal of meritorious historical research and writing is merely propaedeutic or precritical to the maintenance of this self-validating mirror of each poised epoch. When the mirror no longer throws back usefully intelligible images it must be renewed by honest appraisal of the imaginative syntheses of prior epochs. Such enquiry nowadays tends to bewilderment and to the tenebrous by reason of the richness of the available record. In these latter days the historian is a modifier of pre-established images, his fundamental renovations of vision are few. The mirror stands there; it is bequeathed to us; we need it; it is a strenuous, intellectual task to preserve it at a working level of provocative clarity. Therefore it is especially desirable that higher historiography escape gossip-mongering about the defenseless dead, or that other form of intrusive projection of current frustrations upon past behaviour, the romanticizing of energy potentials of other eras
Aesthetics · Art · CLARITY · Energy (signal processing · Epistemology · Gossip · Historiography · Legibility · Linguistics · Narrative · Sight · Sociology · Visual arts · Biographical and Historical Analysis · European Political History Analysis · History · History of Emotions Research · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
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