CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Zeeman, Ruben |
|---|---|
| Title | As If History Would Look the Same When Read Backwards: A Formal Analysis of Contemporary History Production |
| Summary | This thesis is concerned with the forms of history. In particular, the forms of those historiographical works produced between the 1960s and the present that defy the formal conventions of “European” history production. I will build on four insights about historiographical form: that form interacts with content; that form can be analyzed as a kind of historical evidence; that formal innovation is a response to methodological questions; and that form foregrounds the readers and interpretative communities of history production. In the first part, I will embed formal innovations in the intellectual context of the period between the 1960s–2000s. I will argue that what is often referred to by historians as “postmodernism”, conflates a complex extended discursive triangle of variedly well-defined (and variedly well-understood) ideas of “(post-) modernismȁ d;, “(post-) structuralism&# x201d;, “(post-) narrativism 01d; and the “Linguistic Turn.” I will argue that despite these concepts’ simultaneous emptiness and overdetermination, some ideas can be recovered from the polemics of this period that underlie many of the unconventional formal elements that historians have employed. In the second part, I will analyze four works that employ polyphony. I will look particularly at the position of the author-historian in these works and analyze what methodological questions provoked the introduction of these polyphonic elements. By comparing polyphony with the Rashomon effect, I will further suggest a number of differences between the need for synthesis in history as compared to law. Underlying this thesis is what I conceive of as a need to cultivate a critical historical literacy. Cultivating a critical historical literacy can make both readers and historians more aware of how histories are produced, within what “storehouses of narrative” meaning making takes place, how form and contact interact, and how particular orderings of events serve rhetorical purposes. This also has a current political urgency, given the eruption of political falsifications in countries all around the world. A critical historical literacy can carve out a space between historical falsification and methodological and formal orthodoxy, acknowledging that ‘between the Scylla of false omniscience and the Charybdis of “post-truth” relativism lies a whole world of possibilities.’ |
| Supervisor | Meurer, Ulrich; Trencsényi, Balázs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/zeeman_ruben.pdf |
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