Jeffrey Andrew Barash
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226399157
- eISBN:
- 9780226399294
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226399294.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter places in a critical perspective recent forms of historical skepticism voiced above all by Roland Barthes and Hayden White. In the fields of literary criticism and historical theory, ...
More
This chapter places in a critical perspective recent forms of historical skepticism voiced above all by Roland Barthes and Hayden White. In the fields of literary criticism and historical theory, each of these authors respectively reduces the historian's representations to the imaginative projection of present constructions onto a past to which they are ineluctably foreign. Since, according to this view, the claim to historical knowledge proves to be an illusory expression of present concerns, historical skepticism undercuts any meaningful distinction that might be drawn between collective memory retained by present generations and the remote historical past beyond all living memory. To refute historical skepticism, this chapter draws less on historical works themselves than on novels. According to its argument, the novels of Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald, highlight the fact that the "reality" of the historical past in its distinction from the present corresponds not only to an assemblage of verifiable details but also to patterns of contextual nuance implicit in the past's symbolic structure. Through an exercise of the "historical sense", novels are capable of sounding the finite depths of collective memory and of revealing the dynamics of its passage into the historical past.Less
This chapter places in a critical perspective recent forms of historical skepticism voiced above all by Roland Barthes and Hayden White. In the fields of literary criticism and historical theory, each of these authors respectively reduces the historian's representations to the imaginative projection of present constructions onto a past to which they are ineluctably foreign. Since, according to this view, the claim to historical knowledge proves to be an illusory expression of present concerns, historical skepticism undercuts any meaningful distinction that might be drawn between collective memory retained by present generations and the remote historical past beyond all living memory. To refute historical skepticism, this chapter draws less on historical works themselves than on novels. According to its argument, the novels of Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald, highlight the fact that the "reality" of the historical past in its distinction from the present corresponds not only to an assemblage of verifiable details but also to patterns of contextual nuance implicit in the past's symbolic structure. Through an exercise of the "historical sense", novels are capable of sounding the finite depths of collective memory and of revealing the dynamics of its passage into the historical past.
Jeffrey Andrew Barash
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226399157
- eISBN:
- 9780226399294
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226399294.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
If collective remembrance is as old as human communal existence and the age-old practices that forge its cohesion, theoretical preoccupation with the phenomenon of collective memory is relatively ...
More
If collective remembrance is as old as human communal existence and the age-old practices that forge its cohesion, theoretical preoccupation with the phenomenon of collective memory is relatively recent. The present book accounts for this paradox through interpretation of the novel function accorded to collective memory which, in a modern context of discontinuity and dislocation, reoccupies the space that has been left vacant by the decline of traditional assumptions concerning human socio-political identity. In this situation, where memory is widely called upon as a source of collective cohesion, this book aims to elaborate a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and to delimit its scope in relation to the historical past. Extensive analysis is devoted to the complex modes of symbolic configuration of collective memory in the public sphere. These modes of symbolic configuration have undergone radical transformation over the past century that is both reflected and engendered by the new technologies of mass communication by virtue of their capacity to simulate direct experience and remembrance through the image. Such transformations make increasingly palpable the limited scope of collective memory, rooted in a rapidly changing context, in the face of an historical past beyond its pale. The growing awareness of these limits, however, and of the opacity of the historical past, need not fuel historical skepticism: as the novels of Walter Scott, Marcel Proust and W. J. Sebald serve to illustrate, it may place in evidence subtle nuances of temporal context that are emblematic of historical reality.Less
If collective remembrance is as old as human communal existence and the age-old practices that forge its cohesion, theoretical preoccupation with the phenomenon of collective memory is relatively recent. The present book accounts for this paradox through interpretation of the novel function accorded to collective memory which, in a modern context of discontinuity and dislocation, reoccupies the space that has been left vacant by the decline of traditional assumptions concerning human socio-political identity. In this situation, where memory is widely called upon as a source of collective cohesion, this book aims to elaborate a philosophical basis for the concept of collective memory and to delimit its scope in relation to the historical past. Extensive analysis is devoted to the complex modes of symbolic configuration of collective memory in the public sphere. These modes of symbolic configuration have undergone radical transformation over the past century that is both reflected and engendered by the new technologies of mass communication by virtue of their capacity to simulate direct experience and remembrance through the image. Such transformations make increasingly palpable the limited scope of collective memory, rooted in a rapidly changing context, in the face of an historical past beyond its pale. The growing awareness of these limits, however, and of the opacity of the historical past, need not fuel historical skepticism: as the novels of Walter Scott, Marcel Proust and W. J. Sebald serve to illustrate, it may place in evidence subtle nuances of temporal context that are emblematic of historical reality.
