History Is A Contemporary Literature

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.

In this provocative and original study, David Price investigates history as a form of poiesis -- the act of making in language -- and suggests that certain novels can provide the best means of engaging in historical interpretation. Contending that the fundamental act of narration itself, including the narration of history, expresses a system of values, Price explores the work of seven contemporary novelists who share a commitment to reexamining history as idea and a refusal to accept history as given. Within a theoretical framework based on Friedrich Nietzsche and Giambattista Vico, Price investigates how these writers -- Carlos Fuentes, Susan Daitch, Salman Rushdie, Michel Tournier, Ishmael Reed, Graham Swift, and Mario Vargas Llosa -- create a discursive space between history and literature, a space within which history can be questioned and the making of history explored. Through their novels, these writers replace the univocal expression of history as a description of "what really happened" with a polyvocality of competing discourses, languages, and points of view. Price's investigation of three modalities of the poietic novel -- the history of forgotten possibilities, the construction of countermemory and cultural critique, and history as myth -- has far-reaching implications for how we read and question the narratives we understand as history. By treating the past as a dynamic flow of values, rather than a fixed collection of facts, History Made, History Imagined fosters a deeper understanding not only of literature and philosophy but also of history and our relationship to it.

"A thorough overview and analysis of the literary scene in China during the 1949-1999 period, focusing primarily on fiction, poetry, drama, and prose writing"--Provided by publisher.

This study presents the changing situation of the Roma in the 2nd half of the 20th century. The authors examine the effects of the policies of the Hungarian state towards minorities by analyzing legal regulations, policy documents, archival sources and sociological surveys. The book offers theoretical background to one of the most burning issues in east Europe. In the first phase (1945-61), the authors show the efforts of forced assimilation by the communist state. The second phase (1961-89) began with the party resolution denying nationality status to the Roma. The prevailing thought was that Gypsy culture was a culture of poverty that must be eliminated. Forced assimilation through labor activities continued. In the 1970s Roma intellectuals began an emancipatory movement, and its legacy can still be felt. Although the third phase (1989-2010) brought about some freedoms and rights for the Roma - with large sums spent on various Roma-related programs. Despite these efforts, the situation on the ground did not improve. Segregation and marginalization continues, and is rampant. ÿ

In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history. In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a jew who was later transported to the death camps. He shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust. We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present--but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of "keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study.

History, memory and trauma as well as their complex interrelations have been lying at the centre of interdisciplinary academic debates since the end of the previous century. These are also themes with which contemporary writers and other artists are increasingly preoccupied in their work. History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction is an attempt at analysing the relationship between history, memory and trauma in the selected novels of Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro and John Banville. The author examines the notion of memory in a variety of contexts: collective memory in the historical novels of Barker and Barry, individual memory as a foundation of the sense of self in the novels of Banville and Ishiguro, and traumatic memory in the novels of Barry and Ishiguro. By applying the theoretical framework of trauma studies to the work of those renowned writers, History, Memory, Trauma offers new interpretations of their novels. The author demonstrates that contemporary fiction moves beyond mere representation of trauma and engages the reader in the role of co-witness who enables the process of working through trauma.

From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

What does it mean to call something “contemporary”? More than simply denoting what’s new, it speaks to how we come to know the present we’re living in and how we develop a shared story about it. The story of trying to understand the present is an integral, yet often unnoticed, part of the literature and film of our moment. In Contemporary Drift, Theodore Martin argues that the contemporary is not just a historical period but also a conceptual problem, and he claims that contemporary genre fiction offers a much-needed resource for resolving that problem. Contemporary Drift combines a theoretical focus on the challenge of conceptualizing the present with a historical account of contemporary literature and film. Emphasizing both the difficulty and the necessity of historicizing the contemporary, the book explores how recent works of fiction depict life in an age of global capitalism, postindustrialism, and climate change. Through new histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, detective fiction, and the postapocalyptic novel, Martin shows how the problem of the contemporary preoccupies a wide range of novelists and filmmakers, including Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and the Coen brothers. Martin argues that genre provides these artists with a formal strategy for understanding both the content and the concept of the contemporary. Genre writing, with its mix of old and new, brings to light the complicated process by which we make sense of our present and determine what belongs to our time.