Poetics as historical methodology

Bibliographic Data

ID24216420
AuthorsRachel Kaufman (0000-0002-9977-780X, University of California System)
Year2026
Pages1-33
Publication date2026-10-05
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRethinking History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1364-2529 • E-ISSN: 1470-1154
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13642529.2026.2727382
OpenAlexW7220456126
LanguageEN
References cited21

How can the tools of the poet enrich the writing of history? Some of history refuses translation. The past leaves gaping gestures in its records, for the historian to evade, or gloss over, or critically fabulate, as it leaves sediments of fractured story, layered through the processes of historical production. How can the historian attune to, and then amend, these formal contours of the archive? I argue that poetics can place the possibility and impossibility of recovering violent or entangled archives into the form of history-writing. I call for a re-envisioning of our forms of historical narration which draws from (or ‘Slants’) the poetics of the archive. Learning from four poets who embed the archive’s contours into the forms of their poetics, and from my own experiences writing archival poetry, I craft a poetics of history-telling that bares the seams of the historical process and holds those rhythms of the archive otherwise lost to historical prose. How completely can we embed the archive’s modes of memory-making into the form of our narratives? I turn to poetics as a new historical method.

Historical method · Literary History · Poetics · Historical and Literary Analyses · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

Tools

Open DOI