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RIP Alun Munslow – 15 December 1947–1 October 2019 Contributors: Robert A. Rosenstone, James Goodman, Keith Jenkins, Patrick Finney, Kalle Pihlainen, Beverley Southgate, Neil Wynn, Jaume Aurell, Ma...

In this article, I examine the relation between history and autobiography in terms of the ‘rules’ and attitudes relating to their production and consumption. Setting these genres and their ...

My aim in this article is to put an end to the continued either-or debate regarding the literary nature of history, whereby attention so easily returns to the fact–fiction issue. To prevent a relapse into this unfruitful argument, I offer a reading that is sensitive to the non-literary aspects of history writing and views them productively, rather than as a problem to be brushed aside in theoretical debate. In an attempt to ‘accentuate the positive’, I thus foreground strengths that are specific to history, that follow from historians’ core commitments. Beyond this questioning of more extreme, purportedly narrativist claims, I take issue with the realist, ‘negative’ tendencies that similarly stem from a refusal to accept history’s contradictory desires. These are particularly evident in the current, popular embrace of presence and experience in talk about the past. I argue that greater sensitivity is needed in rethinking history practices in this direction too, since an uncritical focus on reality...

This conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domanska and Maria Ines La Greca under the same title of ‘Globalizing Hayden White’ at the III International Network for T...

To make predictions about the direction things might take in the future is a fool’s game, but a tempting one. I will begin with a relatively safe bet: with the rarity of hard copies of journals and...

The article approaches history as a genre with specific strengths and weaknesses that stem from its commitment to deal with the past truthfully. Although examination of this commitment has most often led to epistemological debates, that is not the intention here. Instead the goal is to fast-forward past any discussion of the possibilities for objectivity, sincerity, truthfulness, and so on, to engage with the question of what history can and cannot ‘do’, and thus with the consequences of historians’ generic and disciplinary commitments. While this discussion will inevitably relate to the impact historians’ practices have on the potential forms of history writing, and hence ties in also with the broader debate about narrative representation, that, again, is not the main focus. Rather, and based on this charting of the scope and capacities of academic history as a genre, the core objective is to tackle the question of history’s relevance beyond the limited arena of specifically ‘historical’ knowing ...

This issue of Rethinking History, like the forthcoming one, ‘Futures for the past’ (20:3), has been a long time in the making. Originally, the idea was to bring together a selection of authors who ...

Writing on these two books together has proven far more difficult than I anticipated. This difficulty has not resulted from the fact that there is a rivalry and at times even an open conflict betwe...

Historians often accuse linguistic-turn type theorizing a la Hayden White of doing away with the justifications for continuing to write histories. The rather naive interpretation is that if there is nothing in the record of the past to justify valuations in the present – no entailment, as Keith Jenkins nicely formulates it, between fact and value, between the past and emplotments of it – then there is no difference between history and fiction. In this article, I try to go beyond the polarized debate about whether history is fact or fiction not by rejecting textualist theory but by delving deeper into the theoretical assumptions made by parties on both sides of that debate. I consider two crucial but still largely neglected issues: the question of the artifice involved in constructing realistic representations and the limiting effects of the genre commitments that historians abide by in order to remain historians. Taken together, these considerations highlight a strong contradiction between the form and th...

This brief piece, based on a paper delivered at the 2012 UK Social Science History Conference, questions the merits of the common metaphor of communicating as a theorization of ‘doing history’. It claims that, following the rejection of the idea of objectivity in its most radical forms, the idea of conversing or communicating with the past has become increasingly important to explanations of what goes on in historical research, interpretation, and writing. The idea is not without problems of its own, however. Where it positions the past as if indeed somehow an active agent, able to converse with the historian in meaningful ways, the particularity of the past as past seems to deny that possibility. In order to understand the persistence of the communicative metaphor (even in the face of the obvious contradictions involved), the piece relates it to mistaken assumptions in historical thinking that continue to sustain it – namely that of conflating the past with history and that of confusing negotiations of p...

Since the 1960s, and especially after the appearance of Metahistory in 1973, the relationship between narrative and reality has been one of the most important questions in historical theory. Despite this, historians have generally taken the kind of narrative constructivism associated with Hayden White to hold no significance for them. Their justifications often miss the core point, however: What is in question is not how history could derive meaning from the facts of the past (which is an unsolvable problematic), but the responsibility historians have for the consequences of their work because of its unavoidably subjective or constructivist nature. Since Whitean constructivism emphasizes the independence of the meanings of historical stories from past reality, it necessarily also foregrounds the legitimation of interpretations. Hence the question becomes: Why ‘do’ history at all? By examining what narrative constructivism has had to say about the assumptions and rules that define history as a genre – as w...

En este artículo, exploro la aproximación constructivista de Hayden White para la representación histórica, a través de los lentes de la “verdad narrativa”. Mi objetivo es mostrar que –además de ayudar a que los historiadores hagan las paces con las premisas constructivistas– la apertura a una noción de verdad narrativa podría sustentar nuevas y útiles reflexiones sobre los compromisos de la historia disciplinar. Al elaborar la noción, discutiré comunes malentendidos concernientes a la relación entre representación y realidad, la naturaleza de la historia como una práctica discursiva y las afirmaciones más específicamente epistemológicas hechas por los constructivistas narrativos. La atención particular se posará sobre las intuiciones acerca de que el pasado es relatado en sí mismo, suposiciones de que la representación histórica es de algún modo un aspecto “natural” o esencial del conocimiento (de modo que también ensayaré algunos argumentos respecto a la “forma narrativa como instrumento cognitivo”) así como también sobre las creencias con respecto al rol jugado por los hechos en la representación histórica. Además, y a la luz de mi discusión de estos otros sesgos, abordaré el foco popular actual sobre la relación de la experiencia y la historia.

This article presents a selective evaluation of Keith Jenkins' contribution to theory of history, focusing particularly on issues that many historians seem to have had difficulties either understanding or accepting. A core part of the discussion involves the ideological and ethical reasons for as well as consequences of his recognition of epistemological scepticism. The intuitions that underlie Jenkins' turn from advocating ‘postmodern-type’ alternative histories to the denial of history altogether are also examined. After charting the alternatives, and in the face of the reality that history continues to be written in rather traditional ways, the article makes a choice to support Jenkins' earlier position, in which there remained options for ‘postmodern-type’ historying. While this position is perhaps less logical than his advocacy of an end to history altogether, it is more defensible pragmatically. Arguments for ‘ending’ with history are too easily received by ‘hard-core’ historians as a free pass out ...

Many contemporary historians claim to be more theoretically informed regarding the role and nature of historical research than their avowedly objectivist forebears. They readily admit that ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ are ultimately unachievable ideals. They often even say, for instance, that they are aware of the problems involved in representing but that there are unavoidable pragmatic concessions to be made in ‘doing’ history. Yet the full implications of all this often remain unreflected. Particularly the ethical and political motivation underlying the questioning of representation appears to have been missed: many historians still consider history’s difficulties as being limited only to epistemology and attempt to counter them by giving greater attention to methodology and professional and institutional feedback. While this is all very well, it is insufficient in that it only leads them to further neglect of the practical and social significance of their work. The question of why they write their stories is not often asked. In what follows, I argue that cultural history is particularly implicated in this neglect: history as an institution has made room for it in the establishment and in return cultural historians have given up their critical and oppositional interest. Their once new and revolutionary choices of subject matter as well as ways of investigating the past have become standard fare in historical research and writing – the political focus driving them lost in the process. Despite obvious benefits, such co-option has its drawbacks: new critical histories now almost automatically fit within this broadened spectrum of sanctioned approaches, and the implied ‘anything goes’ attitude strips them of their impact. In this way, cultural (among other once alternative) histories now provide so-called serious history with a more popular and

Narrative constructivism – the narrative theory of history following Hayden White – has focused intensely on the search for alternative forms for history writing. At the same time, since the late 1960s, many oppositional efforts within historical research proper have been coopted into mainstream history writing and their political edge has been blunted. Microhistory and feminism, for example, have become fairly standard ways of ‘doing history’ in many history departments. The article proposes that, despite its radical intentions, constructivist theorizing has played a role in the institutionalization and consequent watering down of oppositional approaches. On the most basic level, this claim may be seen simply to reiterate arguments against a postmodernist universalization of difference: if ‘anything goes’, nothing can be used to question the status quo. The article goes beyond such a discussion of epistemological scepticism, however, investigating particular ways in which the constructivist demand for ne...

It is generally agreed upon that Grice’s causal theory of perception describes a necessary condition for perception. It does not describe sufficient conditions, however, since there are entities in causal chains that we do not perceive and not all causal chains yield perceptions. One strategy for overcoming these problems is that of strengthening the notion of causality (as done by David Lewis). Another is that of specifying the criteria according to which perceptual experiences should match the way the world is (Frank Jackson and Michael Tye). Finally, one can also try to provide sufficient conditions by elaborating on the content of perceptual experiences (Alva Noe). These different strategies are considered in this paper, with the conclusion that none of them is successful. However, a careful examination of their problems points towards the general solution that we outline at the end.

Although it is not an immediately obvious aspect of White's oeuvre, much of his theorizing is based on a particular conception of the reader of histories. For him, the reader is no longer a passive creature, simply the recipient of the historians' authoritative messages. Nor is the reader to be ignored by the historian. Rather, the reader is active to such an extent that historical writing – as White sees it – needs to be reformulated to suit this new readership. For White, readers are actively involved in a process of self-creation, to which end they use history. In other words, White holds (what I take to be) a Sartrean view of readers as individuals who are engaged with the world and embrace and pursue beliefs and goals of their own, even when under the influence of a historical text. While attributing such views to White is admittedly a projection from implicit assumptions underlying his theories, it is supported by the elusive political positions he oftentimes appears to occupy. White's underlying – ...

In this article I examine the gap that exists between an individual’s self-identity in a given situation and the later appropriation of that identity in any political programme aimed at changing similar situations. I will argue that an individual’s performance of the self constitutes the first stage in the transition from a ‘self’ to an ‘identity’ as represented in narrative accounts constructed by, for example, historians. To better understand this transition, I discuss briefly the levels involved using the example of Jean-Paul Sartre’s biography of Gustave Flaubert. The account serves as an extreme illustration of a performance of self. In it, Sartre demonstrates how Flaubert’s consciousness of others leads him away from authentic actions. Even at this early stage in his socialization, Flaubert is, Sartre argues, already ‘inhabited by the imperatives he has given to himself as other’. The further appropriation of a self-presentation for purposes of identity politics – as carried out by some biographers,...

In striving towards a limited freedom from the impossible demands of 'objectively' representing the past, historical narratives have lost some of the authority they held on epistemic grounds and thus part of their ability to persuade. Having attempted to reclaim the effectiveness of historical narratives through acknowledging their literariness while also allowing for their political motives, theorists such as Hayden White have, however, been accused by many historians of further undermining the referential nature of historical research. This article argues that by focusing on the practical limitation that referentiality places on historical writing and by comparing it to the equally uneasy place of 'reality' in performance (the term here referring to a particular art form), this referentiality could be made use of in the search for alternative means of representation. Similar to developments in the narrative theory of history, debates in performance theory, in recent decades, have been concerned with the...

(1998). Narrative Objectivity Versus Fiction: On the ontology of historical narratives. Rethinking History: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 7-22.