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Singular Pasts - The "I" in Historiography (Paperback)
Loot Price: R551
Discovery Miles 5 510
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Singular Pasts - The "I" in Historiography (Paperback)
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Loot Price R551
Discovery Miles 5 510
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Today, history is increasingly written in the first person. A
growing number of historical works include an autobiographical
dimension, as if writing about the past required exploring the
inner life of the author. Neither traditional history nor
autobiography, this hybrid genre calls the norms of the historical
profession into question. In search of new and creative paths, it
transgresses a cardinal rule of the discipline: third-person
narration, long considered necessary to the objective analysis of
the past. Singular Pasts offers a critical account of the emergence
of authorial subjectivity in historical writing, scrutinizing both
its achievements and its shortcomings. Enzo Traverso considers a
group of contemporary historians, including Ivan Jablonka, Sergio
Luzzatto, and Mark Mazower, who reveal their emotional ties to
their subjects and give their writing a literary flavor. He
identifies a parallel trend in literature, in which authors such as
W. G. Sebald, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Daniel Mendelsohn
write their works as investigations based on archival sources.
Traverso argues that first-person history mirrors contemporary ways
of thinking: such writing is presentist and apolitical, perceiving
and representing the past through an individual lens. Probing the
limits of subjective historiography, he emphasizes that it is
collective action that produces social change: "we" instead of "I."
In an epilogue, Traverso considers the first-person writing of
Saidiya Hartman as a counterexample. A wide-ranging and
illuminating critique of a key trend in humanistic inquiry,
Singular Pasts reconsiders the notion of historical truth in a
neoliberal age.
General
Imprint: |
Columbia University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
November 2022 |
Authors: |
Enzo Traverso
(Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities)
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Translators: |
Adam Schoene
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Dimensions: |
216 x 140 x 17mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
216 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-231-20399-9 |
Categories: |
Books >
Humanities >
History >
General
Books >
History >
General
|
LSN: |
0-231-20399-3 |
Barcode: |
9780231203999 |
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