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Beyond the Great Story
Beyond the Great Story
Author: Berkhofer, Robert F, Jr.
Edition/Copyright: 1995
ISBN: 0-674-06908-0
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Paperback
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Summary
Table of Contents
 
  Summary

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



Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

 

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