What legitimate form can history take when faced by the severe challenges issued in recent years by literary,
rhetorical, multiculturalist, and feminist theories? That is the question considered in this pathbreaking book.
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., addresses the essential practical concern of contemporary historians. Poststructuralism,
the New Historicism, the New Anthropology, the New Philosophy of History--these and many other approaches are illuminated
in new ways in these comprehensive, interdisciplinary explorations.
"This is an intelligent and well-researched book. Berkhofer poses many thoughtful questions and presents an
excellent guide to theoretical and historiographical debates."
--Michael S. Roth, American Historical Review
"A thoughtful book, balanced in its judgments on the subject of postmodernism's challenge to conventional
historical practice...[It] touches down on countless issues...raising many challenges for historians. Its call
to innovate and transgress established boundaries is scaffolded on a wide reading and impressive synthesizing of
difficult and often oppositional literatures--the evidence of all historiographic comment."
--Bryan D. Palmer, Journal of American History
"A welcome and useful book to all serious students of history...Exactly how should history be presented,
if indeed, in the face of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, it can be written at all? Berkhofer seeks
an answer by constructing `a dialogue among changing intellectual influences' and in so doing has produced a work
of great importance and instruction."
--Virginia Quarterly Review
"Beyond the Great Story is an attempt to suggest how the practice and institutional discipline of history
can survive the challenges of literary, rhetorical, feminist and multicultural theories. Its spirit is both enthusiastically
evangelical and pioneering."
--Moyra Haslett, Imprimatur
"This book provides an excellent introduction to and survey of recent debates among American historians
about history and theory, and its message is that historians should be more self-conscious and self-critical, in
a word more reflexive in their writing and reviewing."
--W. Stafford, English Historical Review
Table of Contents
Preface
The Postmodernist Challenge
Interdisciplinary Challenges
Debating the Implications
A Problematic Defense
Texts and Contexts
Clio at the Crossroads
Narratives and Historicization
The Paradigm of Normal History
Contextualism as a Methodology
The Multiple Roles of Narrativization
Great Stories and the Search for a Larger Context
Historical Representations and Truthfulness
Interpretations and Historical Realism
The Fallacy of a Single Right or Best Interpretation
The Insufficiency of Facts
Representation and Referentiality as Interpretive Structures
The Role of Meta-Understanding
History versus Fiction
Contrasting Views of History as a Text
Interpretation, Metahistory, and Truthfulness
The New Rhetoric, Poetics, and Criticism
Toward Historical Criticism
A Formal Taxonomy of Textual Analysis
Beyond Style
The New Rhetoric of History
A New Poetics of Historical Criticism
Emplotment: Historicizing Time
The Time of Normal History
Textual or Discourse Time versus Chronological Time
History versus Chronology: The Problem of Patterning
The Nature and Uses of Emplotment
Beginnings, Middles, and Endings
Emplotment as Meaning and Lesson
Toward a Poetics of Emplotment
Narrativity and the Great Past
Partiality as Voice and Viewpoint
The Problems of Partiality
The Historian in the Text
Voice and Viewpoint
Representing Multiple Viewpoints and Voices
New Viewpoints on History
Changing the Representation of Otherness
The Question of Representativeness
Multiculturalism and Normal History
The Reorientation of Anthropology
Toward a Dialogic Ideal
Politics and Paradigms
The Politics of Historical Practice
The Politics of Viewpoint
Foundations of Authority
The Politics of Paradigms
The Politics of the Medium versus the Message
Reflexive (Con)Textualization
A Basic Guide
Theories, Models, Images
Toward New Historicizations
Transforming Historical Practice