Abstract
Nearly all of the work in the historiography of collective memory has focused on issues of historical representation. Still, experience remains its existential ground, and the postmodern emphasis on the rhetoric of historical discourse has incited a reactive interest in human subjectivity. Those scholars stressing representation maintain a sober critical distance from their subject matter. Those favoring experience stress vicarious emotional identification with the historical actors of the past, as if it were possible to make them “come alive again.” The latter approach has long been identified with amateur historians, history buffs, and writers of historical fiction. But since the turn of the twentieth century, some professional historians express openness toward the heuristic value of performative modes of presenting the past for drawing a wider public into an interest in history. I review recent historiographical discussion of the nature and significance of this broader understanding of the historians’ enterprise.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream; The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- 2.
Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (1957; Florence, Kentucky: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004) is now in its sixth edition.
- 3.
Hayden V. White, Metahistory; The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, and his more recent Figural Realism; Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
- 4.
Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1997).
- 5.
Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History; New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (London: Routledge, 2003), 2, 9, 39, 59.
- 6.
Ibid., 5, 39.
- 7.
Ibid., 3–8, 27, 39–58.
- 8.
See Michael S. Roth, “Classic Postmodernism,” History and Theory 43/3 (October 2004): 372–78.
- 9.
Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn; Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 1–11.
- 10.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 135–48.
- 11.
Issuing from Foucault’s line of inquiry was the “new historicism” movement, a venture whose leading spokesmen were literary critics rather than historians. The term is a misnomer, for this historiographical current was not the old historicism revisited, but rather repudiated. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, leading proponents, called attention to the cultural negotiation involved in the interplay among textual references. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing the New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–19.
- 12.
Patrick Hutton, “The Foucault Phenomenon and Contemporary French Historiography,” Historical Reflections 17 (1991), 77–102.
- 13.
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice; Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38.
- 14.
Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Random House, 1988); idem, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self; A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther Martin et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49.
- 15.
James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988).
- 16.
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits:1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4 vols.
- 17.
The editors of the Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 252, point out how little Foucault himself wrote directly about the topic of memory, for the topic ran against the line of argument that he was propounding. In one lone reference in an essay on Nietzsche, he introduces the term “counter-memory” to characterize history as it sets itself free from the notion that memory should be its matrix.
- 18.
Jerrold Seigel, “Avoiding the Subject: A Foucaultian Itinerary,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51/2 (April 1990): 273–99.
- 19.
Ibid., 281–85.
- 20.
Ibid., 287–93.
- 21.
Ibid., 297.
- 22.
Ibid., 298; See also Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an Interview,” in Bernauer, ed., The Final Foucault, 1–20.
- 23.
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault; A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995), 457–80.
- 24.
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
- 25.
Ibid., 364–74.
- 26.
Ibid., 362–63.
- 27.
Frank A. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); idem, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 28.
Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 29–74.
- 29.
Erich Auerbach Mimesis; The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1953), a seminal philological study of the historical elaboration of this concept, is minimalist as theoretical interpretation. His study has, nonetheless, been highly influential as an approach to the aesthetic fashioning of narrative.
- 30.
Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 197–217.
- 31.
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 17–68.
- 32.
Ibid., 119–28, 133–39.
- 33.
Ibid., 128–33.
- 34.
Ibid., 225–27, 306–12.
- 35.
Ibid., 182–83.
- 36.
Among professional historians, Harvard art historian Simon Schama is a master at drawing history as representation as closely as possible to history as experience, as in his Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995).
- 37.
For the mindset of historical reenactors, Jenny Thompson, War Games; Inside the World of 20th-Century War Reenactors (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010).
- 38.
Diane Bartel, Historic Preservation; Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
- 39.
The topic is explored in both theory and practice by Roger Bechtel, Past Performance; American Theatre and the Historical Imagination (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
- 40.
Schama has his critics. In a review of Schama’s Dead Certainties (New York: Random House, 1991), historian Gordon Wood chides him for straying too close to fiction. “Novel History,” New York Review of Books 38/12 (27 June 1991).
- 41.
See the collection of essays on the “performative turn” in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter, eds., Performing the Past; Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
- 42.
Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing,” in Cultural Memory Studies; An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning and Erll (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 345–53.
- 43.
Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories; The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
- 44.
Rigney, “The Many Afterlives of Ivanhoe” in Performing the Past, ed. Karin Tilmans, 207–34.
- 45.
Ibid., 224–29.
- 46.
Hartog, Regimes of Historicity; Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), trans. of the French ed. of 2003.
- 47.
François Hartog, “Temps et histoire; ‘Comment écrire l’histoire de France?’” Annales HSS 50/6 (1995): 1219–36.
- 48.
Hartog on historiography of antiquity François Hartog, Mémoire d’Ulysse (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Le Miroir d’Hérodote; Essais sur la representation de l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Le XIXe Siècle et l’histoire: Le Cas Fustel de Coulanges (Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).
- 49.
Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, xvii–xviii, 15–18.
- 50.
Ibid., 72–77.
- 51.
Ibid., 131–41.
- 52.
Ibid, 107–14.
- 53.
Ibid., 65–99.
- 54.
On presentism as a conception of historical time, see also Chris Lorenz, “Unstuck in Time. Or, the Sudden Presence of the Past,” in Performing the Past, ed. Tilmans, 67–102. Lorenz includes commentary on Hartog’s thesis.
- 55.
Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 149–54, 186–91, 193–204.
- 56.
Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Looked at Again for the 1990s (New York: Norton, 1991), 183.
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Hutton, P.H. (2016). Negotiating the Boundary between Representation and Experience. In: The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49466-5_7
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