Books by Philippe Carrard
History as a Kind of Writing: Michel de Certeau and the Poetics of Historiography Over the past t... more History as a Kind of Writing: Michel de Certeau and the Poetics of Historiography Over the past ten years, Certeau's work has often been regarded as a ''founding charter'' (to use Tom Conley's term) for cultural studies. 1 Because of its concern with ordinary people and everyday life, as well as with issues of otherness, difference, and exclusion, that work now appears related to the kind of research that developed in England during the s and s, then spread to the United States, where it met with considerable success in the academy. Some of the essays collected in L'invention du quotidien have been anthologized in cultural studies readers, and Certeau is frequently cited in those. 2 However, his work's current status in cultural studies should not overshadow the novelty and significance of his contributions to other fields, particularly to what I have elsewhere proposed calling the ''poetics of historiography'': the rules, codes, and conventions that frame historical writing. 3 Indeed, when Certeau's first essays on historiography appeared in the early s, very few French scholars were concerned with the operations of academic writing. Historians were doing ''normal'' research, striving to accumulate more information about the past and to open The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Spring .
Articles and book chapters by Philippe Carrard
Most theorists of history now seem to regard narrative as the only discursive model on which hist... more Most theorists of history now seem to regard narrative as the only discursive model on which historians rely to make sense of the past. The structure of many works in current historiographic production, however, is not that of a narrative as defined in literary theory. The histories of World War II I have selected for my corpus, for example, do not all tell a story; several of them take the form of synchronic analyses bearing on some aspects of the conflict. Furthermore, those histories of the war that tell a story follow different models and have widely divergent degrees of narrativity. That is, they resort at various levels of frequency and deliberateness to strategies that narratologists such as Sternberg and Baroni view as typical of storytelling. Positing readers who know how the war ended (the Allies won), they do not turn to "suspense" but seek to arouse "curiosity" by making counterfactual hypotheses ("What if…") that offer alternatives to what actually happened. Furthermore, they attempt to create "surprise" by proposing "new versions of" grounded in recently uncovered evidence and/or thus far unasked questions. As Dorrit Cohn speaks of the "distinction of fiction," it would thus be legitimate to speak in these areas of the "distinction of historiography." Indeed, the "classical," nineteenthcentury extra-heterodiegetic narratives to which histories are frequently compared are unlikely to include counterfactuals, as they are unlikely to offer new, "better" versions of the events that they report.
Pràcticas da Historia, 2018
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Books by Philippe Carrard
Articles and book chapters by Philippe Carrard