Polish Theory of History and Metahistory in Topolski, Pomian, and Tokarczuk PDF Download

Author: Jan Pomorski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000912027
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book traces the development of the Polish theory of history, analysing how Jerzy Topolski, Krzysztof Pomian, and Olga Tokarczuk have both built upon and transgressed the metahistorical theories of American historian Hayden White. Poland’s reception of White’s work has gone through different phases, from distancing to a period of fascination and eventual critical analysis, beginning with Topolski's methodological school in the 1980s. Topolski played a major role in international debates on historical theory in the second half of the 20th century. The book’s second study is a rare opportunity for English-speaking audiences to engage with the thoughts of Pomian, a philosopher and historian of ideas who has both complemented and developed theories of historical cognition independently from White. In the final chapter, the book presents a study of the historical imagination in 21st-century Central and Eastern Europe through the work of novelist Tokarczuk, the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. In considering the contributions of these three thinkers, the book explores the active process by which past becomes history and thus motivates contemporary actions and realities. By deconstructing and reconstructing contemporary theories of history, this research is a unique contribution to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history.

Author: Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000987965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
This book explains some of the psychological processes that go into narrative construction and why it is that we have so much variability of historical accounts about a single historical event. A central focus of this book is how historians go from having unconnected units of data to having a coherent, structured, and organized flow of experiences. The author argues that the way these connections are established responds to certain Gestalt psychological principles that allow us to understand not only how histories are constructed but also how this construction can be rather different depending on how these principles are applied. To illustrate how these principles are present in histories, the author analyzes classic historical writers such as Burckhardt, Huizinga, Vico, and Marx. As well as an explanation of why historical multiplicity happens, the book also offers a way to evaluate different historical narratives about the same historical event. To illustrate how the evaluative framework is at play, the author analyzes two views about the so-called discovery of America. The first one explains what happens in 1492 by using the term "discovery." The second one uses the notion of "invention" to talk about the same set of circumstances. The book provides an important epistemic tool to evaluate these different accounts—one that can be applied not only to this case but also others. This book appeals to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students of history and philosophy. In addition, the book may also attract intellectuals, generally considered, who are interested in how philosophy can inform and question historical practice.

Author: Javier Fernández-Sebastián
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429756097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This book casts a fresh look at what to date has been a relatively unexplored question: the enormous value and usefulness of the metaphor in the understanding and writing of history (and at the historical culture reflected by these metaphors). Mapping a wide range of tropes present in historiography and public discourse, the book identifies some of the key metaphorical resources employed by historians, politicians, and journalists to represent time, history, memory, the past, the present, and the future and examines a selection of analytical concepts of a temporal nature, built upon unmistakeably metaphorical foundations, such as modernity, event, process, revolution, crisis, progress, decline, or transition. The analysis of these and other pillars on which modern history has been built, whether as a philosophy of history, as an academic discipline, or as a set of events, will interest graduates and scholars dealing with the historical and social sciences and the humanities in general. Key Metaphors for History offers a broad overview of historiography and historiosophy, from an unfrequented point of view, halfway between conceptual history, theory of history and metaphorology. Moreover, it constitutes a form of self-reflection of the historian on his or her own positionality when researching and writing history.

Author: Bo Stråth
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003855024
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
For over a decade, the world has experienced an accelerating erosion of a language that took hundreds of years to emerge. It is a language ordering time and space with words, such as enlightenment, reason, rationality, modernization, and the most recent by-word, globalization. However, it is a language that has been accompanied by colonialism, imperialism, racism, the exploitation of people and nature, an unequal distribution of the world’s resources, pogroms, genocides, and world wars. There has been a gap between assumptions underlying a visionary ambition and the often-brutal practices that have accompanied it. Moreover, it is a language that expresses European values, with the implicit or explicit suggestion that they pertain to the whole world, a civilizing mission from a European centre. Although the established narrative argued that there was continuous progress, it was a conclusion reached through hindsight. The idea of progress had to be repeatedly recreated through new visionary projects that attempted to live up to the high ideals their predecessors failed to achieve. Against the backdrop of this meta-normative point of departure, the book argues that a convincing grand narrative has failed to materialize since the discrediting of globalization. In the search for a new narrative, it argues at a meta-normative level for a reformulation of the term ‘global’ away from its close connection to the globe as an unbounded self-propelling market that exists beyond human influence. ‘Global’ should no longer be reduced to auto-playing market fiction but instead be connected to the planet, Terra, the Earth. With reference to Latour and Chakrabarty, ‘global’ and ‘planetary’ mean cohabitation; life on earth is seen as an infinite symbiotic system, nurtured, and protected, but also destroyed, by human action. The book argues that a new conceptualization of ‘the global’ and ‘the planet’ requires input from African and Asian language cultures. The book explores in depth the history of the two political African key concepts of ujamaa and ubuntu and argues that they are cases showing how work on a new global/planetary narrative might look. The investigation of the two concepts demonstrate that translations are juxtapositions that point up what is shared and what isn’t between concepts in two or more languages. The point of comparison is not to develop a uniform, global perspective, even if that were possible, but to develop a global understanding of difference and, through that, to begin to look for a common ground. Translations of political key concepts are the source of a growing understanding of difference.

Author: Ethan B. Katz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000969568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges. The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education; pain, sexual consent, and ethics in the Talmud; the place of reason and devotion among Jewish thinkers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Taubes, Sarah Schenirer, Ibn Chiquitilla, Yair Ḥayim Bacharach, and the Rav Shagar; and Jewish law as a response to the post-Holocaust landscape. The authors are scholars of rabbinics, history, linguistics, philosophy, law, and education, many of whom also have traditional religious training or ordination. The result is a book designed for learned scholars, non-specialists, and students of varying backgrounds, and one that is sure to spark debate in the university, the Beit Midrash, and far beyond.

Author: Piotr Madajczyk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000990095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The book is the first biography of Raphael Lemkin to draw on a comprehensive body of research into Lemkin as a person and his background and will be of interest to both non-specialists and academics. Drawing on archival materials, a nuanced description is provided of the ethnically mixed Belarusian-Polish-Jewish border region where Lemkin grew up and which shaped him, clarifying at the same time some of the misinterpretations that have surrounded Lemkin’s life. Lemkin’s professional career and intellectual interests up to the time of his flight from Poland after the German aggression of 1939 are exhaustively described. In the latter part of the book, the author poses, among other things, the question of how Lemkin’s activities in the United States were influenced by the experience of the first almost 40 years of his life.

Author: Anthony Edward Zupancic
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000921301
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
At its very center, The Cultivation of Character and Culture in Roman Rhetorical Education: The Available Means is a study of the subtle, organic ways that rhetoric can work to cultivate a particular character. This is an extension of the current work in composition studies, which focus on the ways that writing instruction contributes to the development of individual power and agency in students, combined with an ancient understanding of the ways that students learned to act within a particular, accepted cultural framework. It recognizes and reclaims a lost dimension of rhetoric, a dimension that is conceptually linked to the martial culture of the ancient world, to show how ancient rhetorical theory framed the discipline as an education in thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that were necessary to be both a persuasive speaker and an effective leader. Through close readings and analysis of particular rhetorical exercises, the book shows how rhetorical education shaped characters that were appropriate in the eyes of the dominant culture but were also capable of working independently to progressively alter that culture. In showing the ways that rhetorical education shaped a particular character, the book demonstrates the ways that the combination character, culture, and virtue are vital to leadership in any time.

Author: Jörn Rüsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571816245
Category : Historiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Without denying the importance of the postmodernist approach to the narrative form and rhetorical strategies of historiography, the author, one of Germany's most prominent cultural historians, argues here in favor of reason and methodical rationality in history. He presents a broad variety of aspects, factors and developments of historical thinking from the 18th century to the present, thus continuing, in exemplary fashion, the tradition of critical self-reflection in the humanities and looking at historical studies as an important factor of cultural orientation in practical life. Jörn Rüsen was Professor of Modern History at Universities Bochum and Bielefeld for many years. From 1994 to 1997 he was Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld. Since 1997 he has been President of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut). He specialises in theory and methodology of historical sciences, the history of historiography, intercultural aspects of historical thinking, theory of historical learning, and the history of human rights.

Author: Katharina Friedla
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644697513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Author: Jonas Ahlskog
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000285243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
How does history relate to the past? According to leading historical theorists, the relation to the past in history is reducible to evidential, psychological, practical and retrospective concerns. In contrast, this volume claims that historical relations to the past are irreducible products of the logical commitments of history as method. Ahlskog argues that the method of history shapes and enables relations to the past in historical research by invoking past perspectives of meaning for rendering reality intelligible. The book provides a much-needed philosophical clarification of key concepts in one of the most fundamental debates within the humanities today.