Theoretical Perspectives on Historians' Autobiographies PDF Download

Author: Jaume Aurell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317389972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
E. H. Carr wrote, "study the historian before you begin to study the facts." This book approaches the life, work, ideas, debates, and the context of key 20th- and 21st-century historians through an analysis of their life writing projects viewed as historiographical sources. Merging literary studies on autobiography with theories of history, it provides a systematic and detailed analysis of the autobiographies of the most outstanding historians, from the classic texts by Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams, to the Annales historians such as Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, to Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Annie Kriegel, to postmodern historians such as Carolyn Steedman, Robert A. Rosenstone, Carlos Eire, Luisa Passerini, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Gerda Lerner and Sheila Fitzpatrick, and to "interventional" historians such as Geoff Eley, Jill Ker Conway, Natalie Davis and Gabrielle Spiegel. Using a comparative approach to these texts, this book identifies six historical-autobiographical styles: humanistic, biographic, ego-historical, monographic, postmodern, and interventional. By privileging historians' autobiographies, this book proposes a renewed history of historiography, one that engages the theoretical evolution of the discipline, the way history has been interpreted by historians, and the currents of thought and ideologies that have dominated and influenced its writing in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Author: Jaume Aurell i Cardona
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138934405
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book approaches historians' autobiographies, supplying biographical information and theoretical perspectives of the more outstanding historians such as Vico, Gibbon, Adams, Collingwood, Croce, Langer, Schlesinger, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Duby, Ariès, Conway, Steedman, Natalie Davis, Spiegel, Rosenstone, John Elliot and Geoff Eley. It provides a new history of historiography, using historians' autobiographies as a source.

Author: Jeremy D. Popkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226675432
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

Author: Jaume Aurell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226032345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages. The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.

Author: Robert A. Rosenstone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474274234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Robert Rosenstone was among the first 'postmodern' historians, and remains one of the most renowned. In this honest, revealing and often funny memoir, he shows us how he got there and why. Adventures of a Postmodern Historian chronicles Rosenstone's research journeys over half a century. Beginning in the 1960s, his offbeat trajectory took him on adventures through the police states of Franco Spain and the Soviet Union, to the Shinto shrines and Zen temples of Japan and ultimately to Hollywood. Alongside his own memoirs, Rosenstone reflects upon developments and changes within the realm of professional history, which in turn reflect the social, cultural, and intellectual shifts of the late 20th century. A pioneer of experimental and creative history, he suggests how the experience of the historian can inflect the written history, and provides a defence of innovation in historical writing that is both intellectually rigorous and entertaining. In doing so he offers a window into the state of history today – and points to exciting new ways of writing the past. This is a book about the craft of history, about both doing research and writing it. It should be required reading for all historians.

Author: Leendert P. Mos
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387884998
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Since the 17th century, autobiography has an honorable place in the study of history. In 1930, the preeminent historian of psychology, Edwin Boring, writes that a science separated from its history lacks direction and promises a future of uncertain importance. To understand what psychology is and what it is becoming, the autobiographies of famous psychologists is history at it best. Here we find model inquirers of the science who offer a personalized account of themselves and their vocation in the context of the history of the science. What is characteristic of many of those who have contributed to an alternate vision of psychological science is that they never considered themselves, or were considered by others, as belonging to the mainstream of the discipline. In considering an alternative history of psychology in autobiography, the editor invited contributors whose research and writings have pushed the discipline in other directions, pushed its limits, and whose scholarship finds its philosophical framework outside the discipline altogether. If these contributors may not be model inquirers, their scholarship is very much a matter of consequence for those who wish to understand psychology. Among the outliers included here are those who devoted themselves to the writing of psychology, examining its history, theories, research and professional practices, and who enthusiastically embraced, over the course of their lives, the discipline as a human science. Their influence has been subtle as has been their appeal to many students who affection for the discipline finds its promise in a discerning self-awareness and a critical understanding of others and their worlds. This volume is not simply a collection of personal chronologies which might inspire or lend appreciation to a younger generation. Our contributors write from their personal and professional experience, of course, but they write of their thinking and understanding of the psyche as an aspect of human life, of psychology as an academic form of human sciences’ inquiry, and so bring to bear their scientific and philosophical imagination to their personal challenges in their chosen vocation as psychologists. Our contributors cover a broad swath of the second half of the 20th century, the century of psychology. Nurturing the discipline from within various philosophical, social-political, and cultural roots, their autobiographies exemplify marginality, if not alienation, from the mainstream, even as their professional and personal lives give expression to engaged scholarship, commitment to vocation and, straightforwardly and reflectively, a love of the heart. From Germany, Carl Graumann, from France, Erika Apfelbaum, from Canada, David Bakan and Kurt Danziger, and from the United States, Amedeo Giorgi, Robert Rieber, and Joseph Rychlak, relate their lives to the larger contexts of our times. Their personal stories are an integral part of the historiography of our discipline. Indeed, a contribution to historiography of our discipline is constituted in their autobiographical self-presentations, for their writings attest as much to their lives as model inquirers as they do to the possibility of psychology as a human science.

Author: Doug Munro
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 176046144X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Including contributions from leading scholars in the field from both Australia and North America, this collection explores diverse approaches to writing the lives of historians and ways of assessing the importance of doing so. Beginning with the writing of autobiographies by historians, the volume then turns to biographical studies, both of historians whose writings were in some sense nation-defining and those who may be regarded as having had a major influence on defining the discipline of history. The final section explores elements of collective biography, linking these to the formation of historical networks. A concluding essay by Barbara Caine offers a critical appraisal of the study of historians’ biographies and autobiographies to date, and maps out likely new directions for future work. Clio’s Lives is a very good scholarly collection that advances the study of autobiography and biography within the writing of history itself, taking theoretical questions in significant new directions. The contributors are well known and highly respected in the history profession and write with an insight and intellectual energy that will ensure the book has considerable impact. They examine cutting-edge issues about the writing of history at the personal level through autobiography and biography in diverse and innovative ways. Together the writers have provided reflective chapters that will be widely read for their impressive theoretical advances as well as being inspirational for new entrants to the disciplinary area. — Patricia Grimshaw, University of Melbourne Clio’s Lives brings together a most interesting and varied cast of contributors. Its chapters contain sophisticated and well-penned ruminations on the uses of biography and autobiography among historians. These are clearly connected with the general themes of the volume. This delightfully mixed bag makes very good reading and, as well, will serve as a substantial contribution to the study of the biography and autobiography. — Eric Richards, Flinders University

Author: James Olney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400856310
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Professor Olney gathers together in this book some of the best and most important writings on autobiography produced in the past two decades. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: JolantaT. Pekacz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351556967
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of these assumptions have lost their hold as viable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. For example, the accumulation of facts is no longer believed to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject; nor are the traditional views of the unified self and the self as a foundational idea taken for granted. This volume brings together musicologists and historians who explore, through individual case studies, the rich potential of these new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this volume examine how the insights provided by these theories illuminate our critical reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works these biographies were used to construe - and help forge new approaches to musical biography. The authors also explore the functions musical biographies served in different historical contexts, the relevance of biography for musical criticism, the reliability of archival evidence, the ethics of biography, the demands placed on biography by feminist and gender history, and the new possibilities offered by cinema. The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem

Author: Erika Balsom
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262529068
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary. Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of “fly on the wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality but as a way of coming to terms with reality through images and narrative. This book collects writings by artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, to investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary. Their investigations take many forms—essays, personal memoirs, interviews, poetry. Contemporary art turned away from the medium and toward the world, using photography and the moving image to take up global perspectives. Documentary filmmakers, meanwhile, began to work in the gallery context. The contributors consider the hybridization of art and film, and the “documentary turn” of contemporary art. They discuss digital technology and the “crisis of faith” caused by manipulation and generation of images, and the fading of the progressive social mandate that has historically characterized documentary. They consider invisible data and visible evidence; problems of archiving; and surveillance and biometric control, forms of documentation that call for “informatic opacity” as a means of evasion. Contributors Ariella Azoulay, Zach Blas, Christa Blümlinger, Stella Bruzzi, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Kris Fallon, Evgenia Giannouri, Ben Lerner, SylveÌre Lotringer, Antonia Majaca, Sohrab Mohebbi, Volker Pantenburg, Veìreìna Paravel, Christopher Pinney, Ben Rivers, and Eyal Sivan Copublished with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin