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This chapter discusses the English bias in current conceptions of the literature of the 1930s. It recasts the historical context of the 1930s in terms of global events and proceeds to locate Irish literary history within this broader context. A revisionary overview of Irish history during the decade is offered, followed by a critique of prevailing literary approaches, which are seen to simplify Irish poetry of the time by creating a sharp split between Irish modernist poets and overtly ‘Celtic’ poets. This simplified dichotomy censors the kind of complications found in Louis MacNeice and W. B. Yeats, among others, and an argument for their central importance is made. The chapter then proposes a new method of literary historiography based on aesthetic form, seeking to fuse the tenets of New Criticism and Marxist aesthetics, and adapting ideas from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Hayden White’s Metahistory to explore how poetry represents history.

This chapter offers a new way to understand the relationship between history and truth, drawing on Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. It argues that debates about history and representation, about history and memory, about whether history is an art or a science, are really debates about the sort of truth to which history aspires. Drawing on Bernard Williams and Donald Davidson, it argues that there are two rival conceptions of truth: truth as correspondence, and following Heidegger, that this relies upon the second sense of truth, truth as uncovering. The chapter then reinterprets Heidegger's understanding of truth in the light of Levinas's ethical philosophy, and argues for a new, ethical understanding of the role of history (history without historicism). It offers two examples of thinkers who implicitly draw on these distinctions, Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White.

This chapter analyses the work of the Holocaust historian and thinker, Saul Friedländer. It argues that his early work is characterized by an adherence to the Rankean, empiricist traditions. However, with his memoir, When Memory Comes, his work takes on a new relation to the philosophical issues raised by the Holocaust. Friedländer writes against the ‘normalization’ of the Holocaust by the empiricist historical tradition, and for a wider ‘historical consciousness’ in relation to trauma and ‘working through’. Friedländer argues that the ‘voice of the commentator’ should clearly be heard. The chapter then looks at three works in which this happens including Friedländer's own Nazi Germany and the Jews and Mark Roseman's The Past in Hiding. The chapter ends by stressing the strong affinities between Friedländer's thought and Derrida's deconstruction.

This chapter explores the limits of historical explanation by offering an analysis of the controversy between Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Christopher Browning. It argues that it is their metahistorical commitments, not the ‘facts of the matter’ that mean they are in dispute. Goldhagen takes an anthropological approach, influenced by Clifford Geertz, and writes an explicitly moral ethnographic history. On the other hand, Browning offers a more traditional historical approach. However, Browning's reference to and reliance on the flawed Milgram authority experiments reveal an ahistorical view of humanity and history. This chapter argues that these two approaches cannot be unified, and this reveals the central importance of philosophical questions for history. It turns to Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas to suggest theoretical avenues for further Holocaust historical research.

This chapter looks at the significance of metahistory in combating Holocaust Denial, and takes as its case study the Irving/Lipstadt Libel Case from 2000. After describing the metahistorical commitments of denial, the chapter outlines a postmodern understanding of historical writing as a genre, developing the ideas of Jean-François Lyotard in The Differend, with generic rules, including conventions about evidence, context, and reasonable argument. It then argues that the trial showed that David Irving did not follow these conventions, and that, as the Judge made clear — it was this that showed Irving to be no historian. This analysis of the trial is then used to illuminate problems in empiricist defences of history, and to defend postmodern thought against the charge that it allows Holocaust denial.

This chapter considers five a priori issues: what Jews are, the status of the Exile (galut), how Jews fit into history, which metahistory to choose, and metahistory as destiny. Anyone who sets out to write about Jewish history — no matter what period or place — confronts these basic questions about the enterprise before actually undertaking the task. One's position on these fundamental problems creates a framework within which the research will be presented and by which the narrative will be significantly affected. Before the development of postmodern consciousness, the engagement of Jewish historians with these issues was usually oblique and tacit, their positions typically presented as part of the conclusions of their research. However, it is now apparent that these positions represented prior assumptions that, in part, guided that research, and influenced its interpretation and presentation.

This chapter uses the term ‘postmodern’ to code a new set of circumstances and processes interacting to mark the period in which they became operative as substantially different from the preceding time. It argues that, at least in terms of Jewish history, the ‘postmodernity’ — in the literal sense of succeeding modernity — of the current era is demonstrable. By proposing this periodization, the chapter reveals its own metahistory. Nevertheless, it offers this construction in the hope that it will be part of a process of reconsideration of how we configure, organize, and present the Jewish past, as well as how we understand the Jewish present. After all, if Jews are no longer modern, then it begs the question of what that might mean for modernity, if not of the Jews themselves.

This chapter examines how the postmodern, as an aesthetic style and fluid cultural practice, manifests in contemporary Bollywood film texts. Drawing upon the various concepts and traits identified by postmodern theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Hayden White, as well as postmodern film theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Peter and Will Brooker, and M. Keith Brooker, the chapter reveals a variety of postmodern strategies and conventions operating within contemporary Bollywood cinema. It also analyses the films Om Shanti Om, Koi...Mil Gaya and Abhay, as well as several features of postmodernism that are present in them, including depthlessness, blank parody, intertextuality, hyperrealism, metahistory, and the sublime. The chapter concludes by explaining how films such as Abhay may help resolve the conflict between art cinema and mainstream popular Indian cinema.

This chapter examines how French historians “dispose” their texts, that is, how they organize them as coherent wholes. Contrary to prevailing opinions, these texts do not always take the form of a narrative. Some are mapped out as synchronic cross-sections (“tableaux”), as dissections of problems (“analyses”), or as polemical discussions of existing studies (“metahistories”). Accounts of single events, in particular, rarely have a narrative structure. After briefly recounting the facts, the historian devotes most of the study to explaining their significance—what they reveal about the conflicts and attitudes that characterized the period. This chapter also surveys the debates historians have conducted about issues of “disposition,” assaying the meaning that well-established historians like Veyne, Chartier, and Hartog may confer to “narrative” when they claim that histories necessarily fall under this mode, while they themselves do not resort to storytelling in their works.