History, The referent, and narrative: Reflections on postmodernism now

History and Theory

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-24

  Zagorin, Perez ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0012763312     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.731999073     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Eng. , 1988)
2. contains full references to the writings of Beard and Becker and other works in the objectivity controversy, Thomas L. Haskell, in an interesting review-essay on Novick's book, "Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory 29 (1990), 129-157, was one of the commentators who praised it for its objectivity and also defended the concept of objectivity against its critics
3. Novick, That Noble Dream, 2. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., a historian favorable to postmodernism, confirms my view that the objectivity controversy did not cause the American historical profession to renounce objectivity as a goal
4. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 205-207
5. Patrick Joyce has made a similar observation about the endurance of the ideal of objectivity among British historians in "The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain," Past and Present (1998), 207-235.
6. One version of this attitude is perhaps exemplified in the following remark by the distinguished medievalist Brian Tierney: "Metahistory is a fascinating subject in its own right, considered as a branch of epistemology or linguistics, but it has little to do with the activity of the simple working historian."; Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150-1650 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), vii-viii
7. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York, 1997)
8. Geoffrey Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge, Eng., 1991)
9. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Telling It As You Like It: Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact," in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (London, 1997)
10. "Some Reflections on the New History," American Historical Review 94 (1989), 661-670; and see also some of her essays in On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York, 1994). Among historians who take a negative view of postmodernism are also a number of Marxist scholars who oppose it because of its incompatibility with historical materialism; for examples, see the essays by Bryan Palmer, "Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory Revisited," and Neville Kirk, "History, Language, Ideas and Postmodernism: A Materialist View," in The Postmodern History Reader
11. A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago, 1995)
12. David D. Roberts, Nothing But History (Berkeley, 1995)
13. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story.
14. John Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: the Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience," American Historical Review 92 (1987), 879-907
15. Gabrielle Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," and "History and Postmodernism," in The Postmodern History Reader
16. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1995), chapters 6-7
17. Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Hanover, N. H., 1997), chapters 8-10
18. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), 248. Evans's book is to be commended not only for its balance and a number of its discussions but for its helpful bibliography pertaining to historiography and postmodernism (284-301). For further comment on his view of the positive side of postmodernism, see below, 22
19. See also the varying attitudes expressed in a forum devoted to the theory of history in the American Historical Review 94 (1989), which touched upon issues connected with postmodernism and included comments by David Harlan, David Hollinger, Allan Megill, and others. Similar evidence of the spectrum of opinion is also found in the forum on the book
20. by Joyce Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History, in History and Theory 34 (1995), 321-339, with statements by Raymond Martin, Joan Wallach Scott, and Cushing Strout
21. Hilary Putnam, "A Half Century of Philosophy Viewed from Within," Daedalus 126 (1997), 201.
22. The present writer has himself been a participant in this debate and has criticized postmodernism in an essay reprinted in The Postmodern History Reader, Perez Zagorin, "Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations," which originally appeared in History and Theory 29 (1990), 317-335.
23. Writings dealing with the nature of postmodernism are legion by now. For some useful guides to the concept, see the discussion by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (New York, 1991), chapter 1
24. Allan Megill, "What Does the Term 'Postmodern' Mean?," Annals of Scholarship 6 (1989), 129-151.
25. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition [1979] (Manchester, Eng., 1984). Lyotard has elaborated his conception of the postmodern in a number of works discussed in Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, chapter 5
26. See Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to An End? (London, 1992), who presents an account of this line of thinkers preoccupied with the thought that western civilization was giving way to a posthistorical or postmodern age of decline, mediocrity, and loss of creativity. In an interesting essay dealing with postmodernism and the end of history, Perry Anderson discusses the relevance of Cournot and Gehlen, as well as of Hegel
27. see Anderson, "The Ends of History," in A Zone of Engagement (London, 1992).
28. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York, 1957)
29. See the remarks of Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, & Reason (Baltimore, 1971), 61
30. and Ranke's statements in the preface to his Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494-1514 (1824)
31. and from one of his fragments of the 1830s critical of philosophers of history who postulate a steady movement of the human race toward perfection, printed in Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History (Cleveland, 1956), 57, 58.
32. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies [1943], 2 vols. (London, 1947), II, chapter 25
33. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), 191.
34. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959), 120. For the mis-readings of Saussure by poststructuralists and literary theorists and in particular by Derrida in developing his deconstructionist approach to language.
35. see especially the careful analyses by Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London, 1988), chapter 6, and the same author's letter to the Times Literary Supplement (7 November 1997), 19
36. John Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, 1989), chapter 2
37. Leonard Jackson, The Poverty of Structuralism (London, 1991), chapters 1, 3, 5-6.
38. Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," in The Postmodern History Reader, 181.
39. Review in Times Literary Supplement (31 October 1997), 10
40. see also the hopelessly muddled account of Saussure by Appleby and her co-authors in Telling the Truth about History, 214-215, which concludes that the Swiss linguist made it possible to argue that "reality is always shrouded by language. "
41. Jane Caplan, "Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians," Central European History 22 (1989), 265.
42. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, Eng., 1980)
43. For examples of such criticism, see John Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph (1977), 198-208
44. "The Word Turned Upside Down," New York Review of Books (27 October 1983), 74-79
45. "Literary Theory and Its Discontents," New Literary History. 25 (1994), 637-667
46. Tallis, Not Saussure
47. Jackson, Poverty of Structuralism
48. Ellis, Against Deconstruction
49. Jenny Teichman, "Deconstruction and Aerodynamics," Philosophy 68 (1993), 53-62
50. E. R. Davey, '"The Words Which We Are Using Do Not Satisfy Me ⋯' Interpreting Derrida: A Dissenting View," Journal of European Studies 27 (1997), 1-32
51. See the essay by M. H. Abrams, "The Transformation of English Studies: 1930-1995," Daedalus 126 (1997), 105-131
52. Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover, N. H., 1994), 8. As a view similar to Bailyn's and still, I think, pretty largely representative of the historical profession, it is worth adding the avowal of A. Brunt, a sophisticated scholar and one of the foremost British historians of ancient Greece and Rome, that "It seems to me beyond question that the aim of the historian is to discover 'how things really were', even if he recognizes that he can never achieve complete success."
53. The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford, 1988), endnote on historical facts and evidence, 508
54. Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality (Baltimore, 1998), 8, 9
55. Alan Spitzer, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past (Chapel Hill, 1996), chapter 3. In discussing the de Man case, Spitzer shows, as other writers have also done, the way in which postmodernist defenders of de Man like Derrida and others contradicted their own theoretical principles by using arguments appealing to historical evidence, textual meaning, factuality, and truth
56. Roger Chartier, "History between Narrative and Knowledge," in On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices (Baltimore, 1997), 26, 27
57. Jenkins takes this argument from Arthur Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, Eng., 1965), 218-219, but misunderstands it. What Danto says there is not that a theory alone can decide what is to be taken as a fact, but that a phenomenon must first be placed under some description before it can be explained, a very different matter
58. see his "Present Standpoints and Past History," reprinted in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, 1950)
59. Keith Jenkins, "Introduction: On Being Open about Our Closures," in The Postmodern History-Reader, 3, 6, 14, 15, 16, 17.
60. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice," in The Postmodern History Reader, 152
61. Roberts, Nothing But History, 6, and see also 209.
62. Elizabeth Ermarth, "Sequel to History," in The Postmodern History Reader, 57 and passim
63. Roland Barthes, "The Discourse of History," in The Postmodern History Reader, 121-122
64. Berkhofer, "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice," in The Postmodern History Reader, 149-150.
65. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (New York, 1959), 148
66. See Russell's similar remark on the relation of language to "something which is not verbal, for the sake of which.. words⋯ were invented. The purpose of words, though philosophers seem to forget this simple fact, is to deal with matters other than words.⋯"; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London, 1940), 140-141
67. Israel Scheffler, "Epistemology of Objectivity," in Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and lrrealism, ed. Peter J. McCormick (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) 55. This last comment, although cited as a criticism of the logical positivist philosopher Otto Neurath, applies equally to the postmodernist theory of language
68. I take the underlying thesis of realism to consist in the claim that the universe, the world, objects, events, and so on exist independently of our representations of them in thought and language. Searle, for example, defends this position as "external realism"; John Searle, "Does the Real World Exist," in Realism, Antirealism and Epistemology, ed. Christopher B. Kulp (Lanham, Md., 1997). Alston, on the other hand, defends a realist conception of truth according to which a statement (proposition, belief, etc.) is true if and only if what the statement says is actually the case
69. William B. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996). Both of these positions are of course consistent with each other and each would seem to imply a correspondence theory of truth
70. William H. Dray's essay, "On the Nature and Role of Narrative in History,'' in his book, On History and Philosophers of History (Leiden, 1989), contains a helpful review of the discussion of historical narrative by analytical philosophers of history, including W. B. Gallie, Morton White, Arthur Danto, and Louis Mink
71. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973)
72. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978)
73. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987).
74. Hayden White, "Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," in The Content of the Form, 44.
75. Hayden White, "'Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing," in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London, 1989), 27
76. Hayden White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in The Postmodern History Reader, 392.
77. Hayden White, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation," in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1983), 136
78. White, '"Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased'," 34-35.
79. William Dray, "Narrative and Historical Realism," in On History and Philosophers of History (Leiden, 1989), 161
80. See the careful discussion of White's views in Noël Carroll, "Interpretation, History, and Narrative," Monist 73 (1990), 134-166, and
81. Dray, "Narrative and Historical Realism," and Dray's review of White's The Content of the Form in History and Theory 27 (1988), 282-287. Among his comments in this review is that White's central position is "frustratingly underargued," and that when his constructionist thesis is put in question, he lets "rhetoric rather than logical argument assume too much of the burden of its defense" (283). Carroll's conclusion, following his exposure of the fallacies and gaps of reasoning in White's narrativism, should also be noted: "his reduction of all narrative to the status of fiction seems a desperate and inevitably self-defeating way in which to grant the literary dimension of historiography its due" (161-162)
82. Roger Chartier, "Four Questions for Hayden White," in On the Edge of the Cliff, 35.
83. Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History, 72.
84. See Saul Friedländer, "Probing the Limits of Representation" and Berel Lang, "Is It Possible To Misrepresent the Holocaust?" in The Postmodern History Reader
85. The Lang article was originally published in History and Theory 34 [1995], 84-89
86. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), has sought to show that narrative structure is a genuine feature of all human experience rather than a construction retrospectively imposed
87. see the interesting discussion of his work in Dray, "Narrative and Historical Realism," in On History and Philosophers of History, 134-156.
88. Dray's essay "Narrative and Historical Realism" presents an acute critique of the constructionist conception of narrative and argues for the view that narrative structures in works of history have their basis in the events themselves
89. Evans, In Defence of History, 248.
90. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality, 8, 9.
91. An article by James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, who are both academics in the fields of English and comparative literature, documents on the basis of extensive data the very serious decline of the humanities in the universities since 1970 as measured by the drop in degrees awarded, disparity in faculty salaries, lower quality of students, diminished funding, and other criteria; see their "The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money," Harvard Magazine 100, no. 5 (1998), 48-55, 111
92. See Hans Kellner's introduction to A New Philosophy of History.
93. see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988).
94. chapter 2 and passim, and Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998), 177-178
95. Vickers, chapter 9, notes some of the misunderstandings and misuse of classical rhetoric in contemporary literary theory, deconstructionism, and narrativism. On the relationship between rhetoric and the practice of history among ancient historians such as Tacitus and theorists of history such as Cicero, see the studies by T. Wiseman, Clio's Cosmetics (Leicester, Eng., 1979)
96. and A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London, 1978). Both scholars argue that because Greco-Roman writers regarded historiography primarily as a literary genre in which rhetoric played a great part, they held a different view of historical truth than have the moderns; accordingly, they attached less importance to truth and did not ban the use of fictional invention. A. Brunt takes an opposite position in "Cicero and Historiography," Studies in Greek History and Thought (Oxford, 1993), which maintains that the role of rhetoric in ancient historiography did not deflect either historians or Cicero in his observations on history from considering truth as the supreme requirement of historiography
97. see also Brunt's essay, "Introduction to Thucydides," in the same volume.