Juxtaposing and Jostling: The Art of Writing History?

Borderlines. Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing locates and investigates the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in various kinds of life-writing dating from the last thirty years. This volume offers a valuable comparative approach to texts by French, English, American, and German authors to illustrate the different forms of experimentation with the borders between genres and literary modes. Gudmundsdóttir tackles important contemporary concerns such as autobiography’s relationship to postmodernism by investigating themes such as memory and crossing cultural divides, the use of photographs in autobiography and the role of narrative in life-writing. This work is of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, postmodernism and contemporary life-writing.

História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography

In this paper I will analyze the distinctive features of the twentieth century historiography with regards to its most salient events. By doing so, I will provide an interpretation of the struggles which underlay the production of historical knowledge at the end of the century. In contrast to various theories of historiography which assert that autonomy from collective memory is a methodological assumption of the historian, I will argue that historiography is always interwoven with the political and ethical challenges of the historian’s time. In this regard, this paper´s theses are inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ideas concerning historiography, as well as by the interpretations of this ideas provided by other historians and philosophers, such as Enzo Traverso, Dominick LaCapra or Michael Löwy. Their ideas will serve as a framework for understanding the challenges historians face when narrating contemporary history.

Fictionality in Global Contexts, 2014

2005

The use of historical materials as subject matter for literary prose is certainly not a constant in innovative twentieth-century literature. If we view literary history as a multilayered process comprising many different lines of development, and ranging from the clichés of popular literature to the innovative experiments carried out by various vanguard groups, 1 it seems fair to say that we rarely come across historical subject matter in experimental literature during the first half of this century. Practitioners of Trivialliteratur have spawned many a novel about the wives of Henry VIII and other titillating subjects. Novelists of putatively greater stature have sought to increase our insight into the past by producing novels which are perfectly respectable according to conventional literary standards. But experimental writers such as the modernists and the various representatives of the historical avantgarde, 2 who consciously sought to articulate the hitherto inarticulate by designing new literary strategies, generally neglected historical materials. Many avant-gardists were intent on making a radical rupture with the past, a project which did not stimulate the literary adaptation of historical materials. Although the modernists differed considerably from the historical avant-garde in their attitudes toward history, their interest was directed mainly toward the personal, rather than the collective past, apart from a few significant exceptions. 3 It is therefore all the more remarkable that a great number of postmodernist novelists have turned to the collective past as a source of inspiration. The works that have resulted from this decided shift of interest cover a wide range of historical subjects. Many of these novels deal with episodes from twentieth-century history, such as the turn of the century, World War II, or the Cold War; some reach back further than that, while a few have been plotted on a world-historical scale. The literary adaptation of historical materials is conventionally regarded as the province of the historical novel, ever since Sir Walter Scott endowed this genre with a clearly recognizable and widely imitated shape. Therefore, the predominance Lies Wesseling, 'Postmodernism and History'

In: Michal Peprnik and Matthew Sweney, eds. (Mis)Understanding Postmodernism & Fictions of Politics, Politics of Fiction. Olomouc Univ. Press, 2003, 30-42., 2003

On the following pages I would like to share with you, while the present passes into history, some thoughts on the relation between fiction and history that were inspired by reading a good number of novels written in the United States over the last 50 years, mostly during the ´60s and ´70s. Many of these texts are frequently referred to as ´postmodern´ and show several of the features usually ascribed to postmodern fictions: fragmentation of narrative structures, spatial form, entropic meaning, hermetic imagery, disillusioning intentions, etc.

1998

This study proposes that modernity is constitutively based upon a synchronic temporality which perpetuates the present of the ego. Within this matrix, history is subject to the processes of subjectivization and the `otherness' of the past disappears. Postmodernism, it is argued, designates the ...

1993

This paper engages with current psychological and social articulations of trans-generational trauma as experienced by both the “second” and the “third” (post-war) generation. At this point, an increasing historical remove contributes to levelling poignant and incontrovertible differences between perpetrator and victim experiences of the legacy of National Socialism. Marianne Hirsch’s seminal conceptualization of transgenerational memory as “postmemory,” for instance, applies to the formation and contradictions of an inherited memory for children and grandchildren of both victims and perpetrators. Yet, I argue, we need to understand the interdependence and terms of these ‘memory symptoms,’ along with the seeming proximity of such disparate subject- positions as part of a far-reaching historical legacy without dissolving them into a convenient and potentially apologetic history of German suffering. The central question posed by the legacy of Auschwitz may be condensed to: Is it possible to express an engagement with that catastrophic legacy without repressing, denying, or nostalgically rewriting painful memories on the one hand, or circumventing complicity by assuming an undifferentiated position of ‘victim of history,’ on the other hand? This question is particularly poignant in light of the fact that such strategies were often employed to articulate war and postwar memories of the first generation tainted by affect and guilt, and as such passed on to the second and third generation. Taking my cue from recent literary studies that have underscored the ability of literature and cinema to express concealed, repressed, or uncomfortable truths about the past, I focus on the aesthetic representation of history as part of what Amir Eshel has called “the poetics of loss.” In fact, I share and want to build on Eshel’s premise that works of literature do not set out to “master” the past but instead present “imaginative redescriptions” (as used by Rorty) , new vocabularies with which to grasp the contradictions and impasses of history. Understood as such “imaginative redescriptions,” the aesthetic representations of history under consideration here no longer allow the question of a ‘proper or improper’ engagement of history and instead their analysis is driven by the desire to understand rather than to know. In a way, these memory texts dramatize history as a Schlüsselszene, as fiction sustained by what Benjamin has called mémoire involontaire, a memory fed by images, “which we never saw until we remembered.” With this premise, I propose to analyze narrative strategies as employed in recent tetxts by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (Der Verlorene) and Katharina Hacker (Eine Art Liebe) as attempts to stage what may be termed a perspective of ‚trans-generational difference’ with respect to the psychological, social and socio-economic effects of war.