Narrative and Historiography: Writing the France of the Occupation
2000; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity
ResumoFrom 1930s to 1960s, problem of relations between and historiography often was posed in normative terms. The question was: Should historians use narrative? Does that form provide an adequate type of knowledge? In United States, philosophers of science sometimes deplored what they held to be history's excessive reliance on narrative. According to them, that reliance kept in situation of an imperfect science. Unlike physics or biology, was unable to bring phenomena it was studying under a law; it could at best offer explanation sketches, which needed filling in order to turn into full-fledged explanations (Hempel 351). Yet other philosophers challenged idea that science was unified, only way of accounting for a phenomenon being to identify that covered it. Making case for alternative models, they contended that story-telling constituted a legitimate means of making sense of things, one that provided a primary cognit ive instrument as powerful as--if different from--the general laws of natural and theoretical sciences (Mink 185). In France, debate opposed historians of so-called Annales School to their positivist predecessors. Rejecting what they called event (histoire evenementielle) and (histoire-recit), Annalistes advocated problem-oriented (histoire-probleme): a kind of research that would move away from recounting political, military, and diplomatic analyzing instead the problems that are raised by those events, and doing so on basis of an explicit conceptual elaboration (Furet 56-57). Yet Annalistes never described new, better discursive forms that were to replace narrative, and Paul Ricoeur showed that they had not fully carried out their agenda in domain of textual organization. Indeed, according to Ricoeur, even such a programmatically non-narrative work as Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in Age of Philip II actually includes an underlying plot. Moreover, that plot is neither a superficial feature of t ext, nor a remnant from a prior, obsolete kind of research; playing a central role, it supplies a configuration that enables Braudel to operate a synthesis of many, heterogeneous materials that comprise his study (Ricoeur 216). These polemics and controversies now seem to be over. Scholars have shown that is used in such disciplines as (Brooks and Gewirtz), economics (McCloskey), and biology (Latour), and that it offers a perfectly valid mode of knowledge in specific situations. If--to borrow an example from historian Hermann Lubbe--we want to explain why German universities of Bochum and Dortmund, only 15 kilometers apart, both fund expensive departments of engineering and electronics, search for a law won't take us very far. For Lubbe, such a duplication and resulting overcapacity can only be explained historically (544), that is, through a that traces origin of those departments and recounts their growths. [1] While issues concerning relations between and historiography are still raised today, it is less to assess value of historical endeavor than to describe its exact nature. In other words, question is no longer: Should historians use narrative? It is rather: Do historians necessarily rely on narrative? Answers to that question have varied since 1980s. On one hand, following Ricoeur, several scholars have claimed that always (and necessarily) falls under story-telling. Michelle Perrot, for example, states in a brief description of her discipline that history is narrative (38), thus excluding implicitly possibility that historical discourse might take other forms. Similarly, reviewing main features of that same discourse, Perrot's colleagues Roger Chartier and Francois Hartog have titled recent essays L'histoire ou le recit veridique [History or Truth-claiming Narrative] and L'art du recit historique [The Art of Historical Narrative], thus positing from onset that to do can only mean to tell stories. …
Referência(s)