History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences

Ivan Jablonka

Published by Cornell University Press 2018

History Is a Contemporary Literature

Manifesto for the Social Sciences

Ivan Jablonka
Translated by: Nathan J. Bracher

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501710773

Overview
Contents

About this book

Ivan Jablonka’s History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher’s work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes.

Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

Author / Editor information

Ivan Jablonka is Professor of History at Université Paris 13 and a researcher at Collège de France. He is the author of A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, winner of the Prix du Sénat du livre d'histoire, Prix Guizot de l'Académie française, and Prix Augustin-Thierry des Rendez-vous de l'histoire de Blois; and of Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes (Laetitia or the end of men)], winner of the Le Monde's 2016 Prix littéraire, the 2016 Prix Médicis, and the 2016 Prix des prix. Nathan J. Bracher is Professor of French at Texas A & M University.

Reviews

Stéphane Gerson, Director of the Institute of French Studies, New York University:

With boldness and lucidity, Ivan Jablonka calls on historians to rethink how they write about the past. In order to devise new modes of knowing, he argues, historians must imagine a creative history that is rigorous and playful, hybrid and self-reflexive, steeped in reason and open to emotion. I cannot think of a more bracing, urgent book about the changing contours of history.

Dominick LaCapra, Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, Cornell University:

Ivan Jablonka's History Is a Contemporary Literature is an ambitious undertaking that would be suitable for undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in history, the social sciences, and literature. Jablonka's approach is intellectually stimulating and well informed, and it touches on a vast array of material in a highly readable and well-formulated manner.

This engaging text reveals the various ways in which history and literature have always been constituted in a dialectical relationship to one another.... It offers a richly detailed and carefully delineated account of the ways that history and literature have inspired and borrowed from one another even as each has sought to define itself in opposition to the other.... Jablonka is certainly right to insist on history's power to unsettle the present..., and he has made a passionate case that its mission and civic function have never been more vital.

Historical scholarship and literary fiction share a trajectory of mutual inspiration that reaches back to antiquity and continued beyond the Early Modern period.... Ivan Jablonka's book makes the important point of bringing this traditional relationship back to mind. He rightly insists that historians should be aware of the common ground they have shared with literary writers and avoid the misconception that reduces literature to fiction.... Much more important is Jablonka's point that contemporary historical scholarship is in need of reform... that the social sciences and history might complete their entry into modernity by catching up on the literary revolution of the novel in the early twentieth century.

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
The New Frontier Preface to the Cornell Edition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. The Great Divide
1. Historians, Orators, and Writers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. The Novel, Father of History? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
3. History as Science and “Literary Germs” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
4. The Return of the Literary Repressed Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
Part II. The Historical Way of Reasoning
5. What Is History? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
6. Writers of History-as-Science Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
7. Approaches to Veridiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
8. Fictions of Method Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Part III. Literature and the Social Sciences
9. From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
10. History, a Literature under Constraint? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
11. The Research Text Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	236
12. On Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 294
Keywords: historiography; writing; epistemology; research; investigative writing

eBook

Published: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781501710773