Search

A few among the French who volunteered to fight alongside the Germans on the eastern front during World War II have written their memoirs. Those texts, like all memoirs, pose problems of authenticity, veracity, and writing: Was the witness 'really' there? If so, is he reliable? What conventions of representation does he use when he 'writes up' his experience? After answering these questions, the article examines how the volunteers justify their decisions to enlist and especially to testify. Finally, the article describes the peculiar 'outcast memory' that unites these texts: the memory of people who were forced out of the French community and refused to make the gestures that could have led to their reintegration, that is, refused to express remorse or admit implication in the crimes of the Third Reich. Quelques-uns des volontaires francais qui ont combattu pour l'Allemagne durant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale ont ecrit leurs memoires. Ces textes, comine tous les memoires, posent des problemes d'authenticite, de veracite et d'ecriture: Le temoin etait-il << vraiment la >> ? S'il etait la, est-il digne de confiance? Et quelles conventions de representation utilise-t-il pour textualiser ce qu'il a vecu ? Apres avoir repondu a ces questions, l'article examine comment les volontaires justifient leurs decisions de s'engager et plus particulierement de temoigner. Finalement, l'article analyse la << memoire des exclus >> qui unit ces textes: la memoire d'hommes qui ont ete bannis de la communaute francaise et qui ont refuse d'accomplir les gestes qui auraient pu conduire a leur reintegration, c'est-a-dire refuse d'exprimer des remords et de reconnaitre une responsabilite dans les crimes du Troisieme Reich.

History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. By Elizabeth A. Clark. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. x + 325 pages. History, Theory, Text offers a survey of the debates [...]

The multi-ethnic French national football team is discussed in relation to issues of French national identity. Topics include identity and representativeness, the republican model, and integration as assimilation.

By Dominick LaCapra. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 235 pages. History and Reading is made of a series of essays, a genre for academic writing that Dominick LaCapra first [...]

Historians and literary theorists, Robert Berkhofer remarks in his preface, have at least two things in common: both 'underestimate the difficulties of representing the past as history'; and both, whether [...]

The last section in each volume of the recent Histoire des femmes en Occident is titled 'Paroles de femmes' ('Words of women'), and it includes a few pages of quotations. [...]

For years, Josie Catalano, the daughter of Camella Teoli, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, combed her mother's hair to cover a scar on her head without knowing the origin of this injury. [...]

In the first paragraph of Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay self-consciously uses no less than twenty-one visual metaphors, some quite obvious ('glance,' 'outlook,' 'blinded'), others concealed in words that only their [...]

Most theorists of history now seem to regard narrative as the only discursive model on which historians rely to make sense of the past. The structure of many works in current historiographic production, however, is not that of a narrative as defined in literary theory. The histories of World War II discussed here, for example, do not all tell a story; several of them take the form of synchronic analyses bearing on some aspects of the conflict. Furthermore, those histories of the war that tell a story follow different models and have widely divergent degrees of narrativity. That is, they resort at various levels of frequency and deliberateness to strategies that narratologists such as Meir Sternberg and Raphaël Baroni view as typical of storytelling. Positing readers who know how the war ended (the Allies won), they do not turn to suspense but seek to arouse curiosity by making counterfactual hypotheses (What if?) that offer alternatives to what actually happened. Furthermore, they attempt to create surprise by proposing "new versions" grounded in recently uncovered evidence and/or thus far unasked questions. As Dorrit Cohn speaks of the "distinction of fiction," it would thus be legitimate to speak in these areas of the "distinction of historiography." Indeed, the classical nineteenth- century extra- heterodiegetic narratives to which histories are frequently compared are unlikely to include counterfactuals, as they are unlikely to offer new, "better" versions of the events that they report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forgotten during several years and rediscovered by historians of the Annales in the 1930s, Paul Lacombe's De l'histoire considérée comme science (1894) is now quoted in such books as Antoine Prost's Douze leçons sur l'histoire and the Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. Lacombe's work is important from an historical standpoint. Against the focus on single events that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, Lacombe defined scientific history as the identifications of regularities for the purpose of articulating laws. Against the empirical approach practiced during that same period, he also stressed the importance of the hypothesis – of the assumptions that made the selection of the facts possible. Finally, connected to several militant women of the time, Lacombe, sought to do what we would now call "gender history," that is, to study the distribution of gender roles during specific periods. While anticipating several developments in the theory of history, Lacombe was yet a man of his time. He thus did not foresee that his (and his contemporaries') contrast between observation-based and document-based science would later be challenged, some philosophers now arguing that chemists and physicists are not more able than historians to "observe" the phenomena that they describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines what remains of the Linguistic turn (LT) after Hayden White, in the two meanings of the preposition "after": "subsequent to" and "according to". For White, the LT (under the umbrella of postmodernism) has made it possible to transcend a number of distinctions, such as those between text and context, fact and fiction, and history and literature. Those distinctions, however, are still defended by a large part of the historical community, including by scholars involved in experimental works, such as I. Jablonka. Furthermore, some philosophers hold the debates about the LT to be irrelevant. The specificity of history, for them, does not reside in its formal aspects (e.g., its use of narrative), but in its relations to evidence. History, like all scientific disciplines, must validate its statements, namely, establish that they are well founded and justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. By Hayden White. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii + 205 pages. Figural Realism collects essays written by Hayden [...]

The Distinction of Fiction. By Dorrit Cohn. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ix + 197 pages. Poststructuralist theorists have tended to collapse the categories of fiction [...]

The work of Hayden White has been discussed in France starting in the 1980s. The scholars most responsible for its introduction have been the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the historian Roger Chartier. Several historians and literary theorists have followed in Ricoeur's and Chartier's footsteps, praising White for having opened new ways of looking at history, while criticizing some aspects of his work, especially his relativism and his categorization of history as fiction. These debates, however, had not led to translations of White's work into French, the sole exception being the introduction to Metahistory, published in 2009 in the journal Labyrinthe. By translating several essays, interviews, and reviews written or given by White between 1966 and 2014, I sought to fill this lack. Rendering White's writing into French did not raise major difficulties. The process, however, did make visible a few problems related to Anglo-American classifications, as well as to the fact that the participants in the conversation do not always seem to be talking about the same subject matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Hayden White has been discussed in France starting in the 1980s. The scholars most responsible for its introduction have been the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the historian Roger Chartier. Several historians and literary theorists have followed in Ricoeur's and Chartier's footsteps, praising White for having opened new ways of looking at history, while criticizing some aspects of his work, especially his relativism and his categorization of history as fiction. These debates, however, had not led to translations of White's work into French, the sole exception being the introduction to Metahistory, published in 2009 in the journal Labyrinthe. By translating several essays, interviews, and reviews written or given by White between 1966 and 2014, I sought to fill this lack. Rendering White's writing into French did not raise major difficulties. The process, however, did make visible a few problems related to Anglo-American classifications, as well as to the fact that the participants in the conversation do not always seem to be talking about the same subject matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As novels can be mapped, maps in return can be shown to have a narrative dimension. Maps referring to historical events, for instance those of the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, obviously tell a story. Recounted through graphic means, that story has specific aspects in the areas of order, duration, frequency, authorship, and perspective. Yet, similar in this respect to the descriptions that historians provide, narrative maps are neither neutral, nor whole. Grounded in selection, they necessarily develop an argument, are incomplete, and rely on symbols that are both conventional and arbitrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this section draw on the texts of plenary lectures presented at the seventh Narrative Matters Conference, Narrative Knowing/Récit et Savoir, organized at the Université Paris Diderot, in partnership with the American University of Paris, from June 23-27, 2014. Philippe Carrard's article, "History and Narrative: An Overview," is a sequel to his latest book, Le Passé mis en texte: Poétique de l'historiographie française contemporaine [The Past in Textual Form: A Poetics of Contemporary French Historiography]. In this work, Carrard (2014) sets himself the task of examining, as a scholar of poetics, the writing protocols and conventions used by historians when they finally present the data they have gathered in textual form. One of the major questions of the work concerns to what extent the authors resort to narrative form: does the discourse of the historian always take the form of a narrative and, if not, under what non-narrative forms can it be structured? In the article presented here, Carrard begins by providing an overview of the Anglo-American debate over the cognitive value of narrative in historiography. He opposes this debate, involving mostly analytical philosophers, to the controversies about the relations between narrative and historiography in France, which involve trade historians (starting with the anti-narrativist position of the Annales School). Then he wonders whether literary theory can contribute to these debates. Whereas philosophers and historians raised the question, "Does narrative provide a legitimate kind of knowledge?" literary theorists will simply ask, "Do historians rely on narrative? And if they do, on what kind of narrative?" Answering these questions, of course, includes defining what is meant by "narrative," something which philosophers and historians, who seem to take the term for granted, often fail to do and which Carrard succeeds in doing, using the works of Gerald Prince, James Phelan, and other theorists of literary narrative. He then shows that a large part of the historians' production does not fall under narrative, at least not as this term is defined in literary theory, but rather presents itself as what he calls "pictures" ("tableaux"), "analyses," or "anthropological descriptions." In his conclusion, he reviews some of the epistemological problems raised by the modes of disposition or arrangement he has described. (Patron & Schiff, 2015) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the U.S. stock market. It analyzes the way the staff writers of Associated Press (AP) personify the securities industry, the market and individual firms. It also examines some press reports addressed to laypeople, some of the columns in the business part of the "New York Times," and some articles about the economy that appeared in the "Burlington Free Press" and the "Valley News."

Focuses on the historical bases of French fiction. Analysis on various literary works by French authors; Emphasis on the difference between historical discourse and fictional discourse; Comparison between fiction and history literary genres.