Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda

  • Chapter
Historical Reenactment

Part of the book series: Reenactment History ((REH))

Abstract

Ever since the late eighteenth century when new forms of visual entertainment claimed to be able to use technology to replicate or simulate the literal details of nature, scholars, poets and intellectuals have bemoaned the increasing dominance of the realist aesthetic. Classicists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Romantics such as Samuel Coleridge found the practice of literalist simulation to be debased and disgusting. It demanded merely mechanical competence, eliminated the vital creative role of the artist’s idealising imagination, and appealed to uncultivated tastes attracted by the sensational wonders of the technical facsimile. Art lost its age-old raison d’être if it became indistinguishable from literal nature.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. R. Barthes ([1968] 1982) ‘The Reality Effect’ in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. T. Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 11–17

    Google Scholar 

  2. U. Eco (1986) Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

    Google Scholar 

  3. J. Baudrillard (1995) Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

    Google Scholar 

  4. G. Dening (1992) Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 4–5

    Google Scholar 

  5. M. H. Nielsen (1981) ‘Re-Enactment and Reconstruction in Collingwood’s Philosophy of History’, History and Theory, 20:, p. 3.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. R. Samuel (1995) Theatres of Memory (London: Verso), pp. 175–6.

    Google Scholar 

  7. See R. Pearce (2003) ‘University History’, History Today, 53:8, p. 54.

    Google Scholar 

  8. T. Hunt (2006) ‘Reality, Identity and Empathy: The Changing Face of Social History Television’, Journal of Social History, 39:3, pp. 843–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Chapter 1 of B. Gibbon (2005) The Colony: The Book from the Popular SBS Living History Series (Sydney: Random House)

    Google Scholar 

  10. R. G. Collingwood ([1946] 1971) The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Designed by Scotland-based Traffic Games and released in 2004, ‘JFK Reloaded’ is described as a ‘3-D, First-Person Perspective, “Assassination Simulator”’. The player sits in the infamous Texas book repository with a gun and from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald attempts to replicate the magic bullet. Initially a cash prize was offered to anyone who could do so. According to the game designers it was intended to silence conspiracy theorists. See http://www.cool.com.au/computers-technology/personal-computers/jfk-reloaded-revisited-20060414256/. We are grateful to Lucinda Mathieson for this reference. See also J. de Groot (2006) ‘Empathy and Enfranchisement: Popular Histories’, Rethinking History, 10:3, pp. 391–413

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. B. Rejack (2007) ‘Toward a Virtual Re-enactment of History: Video Games and the Recreation of the Past’, Rethinking History, 11:3, pp. 411–25

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. M. Foucault (1977) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 140.

    Google Scholar 

  14. R. Williams ([1976] 1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed., rev. and expanded (London: Fontana Paperbacks, Flamingo), p. 258.

    Google Scholar 

  15. T. Carlyle (1872–3) History of Friedrich II of Prussia, called Frederick the Great, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall,), p. 558.

    Google Scholar 

  16. T. Carlyle (1868) On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall), p. 60.

    Google Scholar 

  17. V. Agnew (2007) ‘History’s Affective Turn: Historical Re-enactment and Its Work in the Present’, Rethinking History 11:3, p. 310.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. A. Cook (2004) ‘The Use and Abuse of Historical Re-enactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History’, Criticism, 46:3, pp. 487–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. See I. McCalman (2004) ‘The Little Ship of Horrors: Re-Enacting Extreme History’, Criticism, 46:3, pp. 477–86.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. S. Baker (2002) The Ship: Retracing Cook’s Endeavour Voyage (London: BBC Worldwide)

    Google Scholar 

  21. A. Cook (2004) ‘Sailing on The Ship: Re-enactment and the Quest for Popular History’, History Workshop Journal, 57, pp. 247–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. P. Connerton (1989) How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 61.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  23. See I. Anstruther (1963) The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament, 1839 (London: G. Bles).

    Google Scholar 

  24. Lamb has outlined this typology at numerous conferences and seminars since 2001. It appears in published form in his most recent book. See J. Lamb (2009) The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto), p. 137.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy, p. 139; see T. Horwitz (1998) Confederates in the Attic, p. 8. See also D. Hall (1994) ‘Civil War Reenactors and the Postmodern Sense of history’, Journal of American Culture, 17:3, pp. 7–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. See N. Elias (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  27. A. Boal (2002) Games for Actors and Non-Actors (New York: Routledge).

    Google Scholar 

  28. S. Magelssen (2006) ‘Making History in the Second Person: Post-Touristic Considerations for Living Historical Interpretation’, Theatre Journal, 58, pp. 291–312

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. R. Blackson (2007) ‘Once More... With Feeling: Re-enactment and Contemporary Art and Culture’, Art Journal, 61:1, pp. 36–7

    Google Scholar 

  30. R. Rosenstone (1995) Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Modern Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  31. See for example S. Macintyre and A. Clark (2003) The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  32. S. Gapps (2003) ‘Authenticity Matters: Historical Re-enactment and Australian Attitudes to the Past’, Australian Cultural History 23, pp. 105–16

    Google Scholar 

  33. A. Schwarz (2007) ‘Not This Year! Reenacting Contested Pasts Aboard The Ship’, Rethinking History, 11: pp. 427–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. The same is true of other disciplines. Drawing on the work of Michael Taussig some social anthropologists employ what they call an ‘intuitive’ approach in the face of fraught fieldwork conditions. Monique Skidmore, for example, has argued that the way to study the lives of those who live in an oppressive regime is to place yourself in danger alongside your subject and write about how you feel. To understand the ‘affective dimensions of dictatorship’, she writes of working in the field in Myanmar, ‘I intuit the experiences of the Burmese people I have come to know well’. Her terror, she claims, allows her to experience theirs intuitively without having to name them. See M. Skidmore (2003) ‘Darker than Midnight: Fear, Vulnerability, and Terror making in Urban Burma (Myanmar)’, American Ethnologist, 30:1, pp. 5, 7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Cited in E. Kerridge] (1951) ‘Ridge and Furrow and Agrarian History’, Economic History Review, New Series, 4:1, p. 14 an

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. R. Holmes (1996) Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Vintage Books).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Iain McCalman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Paul A. Pickering
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Australia

    Iain McCalman (Professorial Research Professor) (Professorial Research Professor)

  2. Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University, Australia

    Paul A. Pickering (Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies) (Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies)

Copyright information

© 2010 Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

McCalman, I., Pickering, P.A. (2010). From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda. In: McCalman, I., Pickering, P.A. (eds) Historical Reenactment. Reenactment History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277090_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277090_1

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36609-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-27709-0

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation