HIS 6061
Introduction to Historiography
Department
of History, University of Florida
Spring
2008
Seminar
meeting time & place:
Tuesdays,
E1-E3, Room 216 CBD
Dr.
Mark Thurner
Office
Hours: Thursdays, 10am-1pm or by appt.
360
Grinter Hall, phone: (352) 392-4672
Email:
mthurner@history.ufl.edu
I. Course Objectives
HIS 6061 is required for all History
graduate students. The course is
designed to introduce graduate students to the history of historiography.
II.
Evaluation and Grading Policy
33% Seminar participation*
–weekly discussion & critical engagement
–workshop presentations
33% Reaction papers**
–5 (five) critical reviews, one for each unit, 4-6
pages each
33% Final paper**
–15-20 page essay on a topic or
figure selected with your working group and the instructor
*Please
do not hesitate to contact the instructor during the semester if you have any
individual concerns or issues that impinge upon your performance and need to be
discussed. Students requesting classroom
accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office (www.dso.ufl.edu/drp/). The Dean of Students Office will provide
documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the
instructor when requesting accommodation.
**In
writing papers, be certain to give proper credit whenever you use words,
phrases, ideas, arguments, and conclusions drawn from someone else’s work. Failure to give credit by quoting and/or
footnoting is PLAGIARISM and is unacceptable. Please review the University’s
Honesty Policy at: www.dso.ufl.edu/judicial/.
III.
Required texts
See below “Topical Outline.”
IV.
Topical Outline
Preface
This seminar is an advanced introduction to what
historiography most manifestly and fundamentally is: a certain collection of
texts subject to certain kinds of readings.
Rather than sample “great books” (although all are good) or, conversely,
“give voice” to every variety or “school” of history (at any rate an impossible
task, although we will make a gesture in that direction), this seminar is
organized around two basic principles or concepts derived from the compound
word “historiography” itself. The first of these suggests that History itself has
a history (Historio-); the second that
histories are linguistic and cultural artifacts (-graphia) whose “shelf life” depends, among other things, on the
receptivity of readers. To investigate
these two fundamental notions requires the very element that makes both
possible, namely, a passion for reading and a desire to contribute in writing to
the conversation. Happily, the pursuit
of Historia and Graphia offers many delights and critical insights that you simply
can’t get anywhere else.
Menu
History is a moveable feast animated by a lively
conversation, but of course it can give you indigestion. Accordingly, this seminar is served in three courses. The first course, or entrée, is dedicated to
the history of History “of/in the West” (Historia). The second course is heavier, and is
concerned with histories as literary and cultural artifacts, that is, as texts
and contexts (Graphia). The third course or dessert will consist of a
“history workshop” in which we will engage and savor the heady delights that
may ensue from a satiated state of being.
Part I. Historia:
History’s History (Weeks 2-7)
History has its history. Among other things, History (that is, in the
uppercase, and as an academic discipline with “general” and expanding, if not
universal pretensions of representation) is a situated discourse with a
significant claim to a large number of shelves (nay, halls) in the library of
knowledge. In the English language –some
manner of which will be the mode of reading, writing, speaking, and listening
in this seminar-- this disciplinary discourse owes a great deal to a “Western”
genealogy which may be traced to the foundational texts of Herodotus and
Thucydides. Given this genealogy of
History it is no good to avoid the canon.
The most common consequences of the failure to cultivate an intimate
knowledge of the Western canon of History are tiresome reinventions of the
wheel, and would-be critiques that miss the mark. For example, many of the
claims of “postmodern” and “multicultural” history have much in common with
Neoplatonist concepts of diversity, and some of these concepts were
operationalized by the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment historicists. “Postcolonial theory” owes a great deal to
the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The guiding principles of the Annals School
of twentieth-century France may be traced to classical ideas of plenitude and
gradation, and to the histories of Herodotus and Tacitus.
The history of history is immensely complicated; the
task of understanding this history is both daunting and indispensable. Fortunately, we now have a synthetic and
highly readable, three-part history of history written by a notable figure in
the field of intellectual history or “the history of ideas.” Kelley’s opus treats many if not most of the
canonical figures of the Western historiographical tradition (that is, the
usually trilogy of English, French, and German) in much more than the cursory
fashion typical of one-volume anthologies of “the classics.” We will, however, complement Kelley’s
discursive triology with two “readers” (one edited by Kelley, the other by
Stern) that gather excerpts from the writings, many in translation, of canonical
“Western” historians from antiquity to the twentieth century. Of course, an intellectual history of history
and a cursory reading of fragments is no substitute for reading as many of the
original works as possible. But –and as
it always is with history-- time and contingency rules. Since it is not possible to read these works in
their entirety in one semester, what we can realistically expect to do is learn
what things we should read, and how and why we should read them.
Required Reading,
Part I:
Unit 1. From Antiquity to
Enlightenment (Weeks 2-4)
Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from
Herodotus to Herder, (Yale, 1998).
Donald R. Kelley, ed., Versions of History from Antiquity to the
Enlightenment, (Yale, 1991).
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, (Harvard,
1964).
Unit 2. From Enlightenment to the Present (Weeks 5-7)
Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History from Voltaire to
the Present, (Vintage, 1973).
Donald R. Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from
Herder to Huizinga, (Yale, 2002).
Donald R. Kelley, Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in
the Twentieth Century, (Yale, 2006).
Part
II. Graphia: History as Literary and
Cultural Artifact (Weeks 8-10)
For the most part, Kelley’s history of history
narrates a heterogeneous “we” (the Respublica
Historiographicorum, a sort of transhistorical textual community of
writer-readers) that includes historians of ancient Greece and Rome, modern
Germany, France, England, and Anglo-America, and from these centers of textual
production fans out to various “frontiers” of knowledge. This tradition or “republic” and its
dispersion would account for most of what we call “History” or
“historiography.” However, it is also
the case that from the very “beginning” this History --which in many ways is a
history of the Western sense of self-- has been concerned with difference or
“others.” It is also important to note
that historical writings of various kinds appear in other places. These other traditions may or may not be
connected to, or derivative of, the long tradition of “the West” examined by
Kelley or Lovejoy and presented in the two readers. Anthropologists have chronicled distinct
“historicities” and representations of time and space, both in the
archaeological past and in the ethnographic present. On the other hand, some scholars would argue
that there is something universal about memory, forgetting, and narrative.
Empirically speaking, histories are linguistic and
cultural artifacts. This fact makes them
available to a critical reading that would not necessarily require that it be
complicit with a “Western” historicity.
Indeed, this fact has given rise to “poststructuralist” and
“postcolonial” critical readings of “History.”
Irregardless of the possible validity of any universal truth claim or
method, histories are always situated knowledges written in different styles, languages,
times, and places and with different archives and libraries. Moreover, histories are always written in,
by, and about an imagined and often implicit “our/their,” “we/them,” and “here/there.” In short, we may say that histories are
“texts” in “contexts” but if we do so must we also ask what it is that makes a
text a text and a context a context. A
text is, literally, a weaving of signs, but in history writing certain
conventions apply in a given place and time, and these conventions condition
the range of styles or modes of narration and discourse. In short, the weave obeys “patterns.” To maintain that “texts” may be explained by
their “context” does not, however, necessarily clarify the situation of a
text’s production, for a “context” is, of course, no more than a conjoining of
weavings of signs. By invoking “context”
we only add more layers of textuality to the reading of a given text: more
patterns. This is more work but,
Protestant ethics notwithstanding, it does not guarantee an “answer” to the
questions that the text poses. In short,
the “contexts” that histories provide are only “explications” to the extent
that they may be seen to operate “outside” a text. In this regard, it may be argued –and indeed
it is manifestly true-- that “contexts” are actually “inside” texts.
In this second section of the seminar we will read critical
readings of history as graphia. These writings raise the following questions:
What is a history? What is an author of
a history? What is a subject of
history? What are some of the literary
and grammatical features of histories? How
is the effect of time or temporality achieved?
How and when do concepts of time change and what effects do these
changes have on historiography? What is
difference? What is place? How is difference and place translated and
represented in history writing? How is
difference “assimilated” or negotiated by established communities or
“republics” of historians? Are “national
histories” fundamentally different from “local histories,” “Area Studies
histories,” or “Atlantic” and “World” histories? Are all modern or vernacular histories --be
these written in and/or about China, India, Ethiopia, or Peru-- somehow “Western”
or “European?” In summary, are the
“possibilities” of history limited or infinite?
If history is imaginably finite, what is it that limits history?
Required Reading,
Part II:
Unit 3. The Poetics or Writing
of History (Week 8)
Roland Barthes, “The Discourse
of History,” trans. Stephen Bann, Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981), pp. 7-20.
Michel de Certeau, “Writings
and Histories,” and “Making History: Problems of Method and Problems of
Meaning,” in The Writing of History,
trans. Tom Conley (Columbia, 1988), pp. 1-55.
Hayden White, “Introduction:
The Poetics of History” in Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, (Hopkins, 1973),
pp. 1-42; and “Chapter 3: The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” and
“Chapter 4: Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism, (Hopkins, 1978), pp. 81-120.
Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of
Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy, (
Unit 4. History as the Poetics
of Modernity (Week 9)
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical
Time, (Columbia, 2004).
Jean-François Lyotard,
“Universal History and Cultural Differences,” and “The Sign of History,” in
Andrew Benjamin, ed., The Lyotard Reader,
(
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on
the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,
(NewYork: Schocken, 1969), pp. 253-264.
Unit 5. History’s and
Modernity’s Others (Week 10)
François Hartog, “Preface” and
“Conclusion” in The Mirror of Herodotus:
The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet
Lloyd (California, 1988), pp. xv-xxv, and pp. 371-381.
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow, (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Chapter 5: Whose Enlightenment Was It
Anyway?” in How to Write the History of
the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, (Stanford, 2001), pp. 266-345.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Introduction:
The Idea of Provincializing Europe,” and “Chapter 1: Postcoloniality and the
Artifice of History,” in Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, (Princeton, 2000),
pp. 3-46.
Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation:
Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.
139-170.
Part
III. History Workshop (Weeks 11-13)
History Workshop: Meeting of the Minds
The history of historical
thought may be imagined and performed as a grand banquet or meeting of the
minds or, in a more contemporary key, a rowdy discussion in a crowded
café. Our seminar workshop will
hopefully fall somewhere inbetween.
The seminar will form working
groups that coincide with “schools” or periods or persuasions of historical
thought. During each of our three
roundtable or workshop sessions, each “school” or group will generate a
response to a historical problematic defined by the professor. Within the groups each student will assume a
specific task (which may be to thoroughly research the positions of a single
historian). This task will be the basis
of the final paper, due Week 14.