In responding to your peers, analyze their proposed use of the new ideas in their historiography projects and beyond. Identify any gaps in their reasoning and offer suggestions
Discussion written by: Shawn
Discussion to respond to:Postmodernism is a theory that allows for questioning of the past interpretations of history. It provides a new lens of critique that demonstrates new perceptions in the historical record. Linguistic Turn refers to the theory that history is interpreted with concepts and not words. A cerebral take on the historical record that strays from simply reading the language and pushes for the meaning conveyed in the language. Both concepts allow for a broader view of the historical record that has allowed modern historians to critique the historical record in every way possible.
White states, no given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements.1. According to him history can not be immediately interpreted by what is written in the historical record. This is just a guide that historians must use to find the actuality of history from these suggestions. This suggests that what the historian brings to his consideration of the historical record is a notion of the types of configurations of events that can be recognized as stories by the audience for which he is writing.2. White indicates that history is an arrangement of stories written for a specific audience. He suggests a history less reliant on documents and more of interpretation of docume
nts. Ricoeurs view also focuses on the interpretation of documented history based in a broad interpretation. The document in fact, raises a question of the relation of historical thought to the past as past. But it can only raise it: the reply lies in the role of historical imagination
3. He implies it is the job of the historian to create a fact based history using imaginative interpretation.
I would not entirely agree with the ideas put forth by White and Ricoeur. For me history has to have an adhered to base of reliable information. As historians we can then interpret this base information with the result staying linked to the established concepts of history. The idea that they present of history being a story seems a dangerous slope towards fabrication. I agree that history is always ripe for interpretation but an interpretation based in evidence.
The concept of a more questioning interpretation of history is the key piece to my historiography project. It is the scrutiny of modern historians of the most often referenced primary source, that I am investigating. As with much of the history of the middle ages, the first hand document is full of bias and misrepresentations. Over time the transcriptions of this document have not been word for word and some parts have been rewritten while others have been lost completely. Modern historians have observed these inaccuracies as a need for reinterpretation of this history. I will use the concept that history is fluid and ever-changing for the rest of my studies to find the most logical representation.