Description
Book SynopsisIvan 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
Trade Review
Historical scholarship and literary fiction share a trajectory of mutual inspiration that reaches back to antiquity and continued beyond the Early Modern period.... Ivan Jablonka's book makes the important point of bringing this traditional relationship back to mind. He rightly insists that historians should be aware of the common ground they have shared with literary writers and avoid the misconception that reduces literature to fiction.... Much more important is Jablonka's point that contemporary historical scholarship is in need of reform... that the social sciences and history might complete their entry into modernity by catching up on the literary revolution of the novel in the early twentieth century.
* H-Soz-Kult *
This engaging text reveals the various ways in which history and literature have always been constituted in a dialectical relationship to one another.... It offers a richly detailed and carefully delineated account of the ways that history and literature have inspired and borrowed from one another even as each has sought to define itself in opposition to the other.... Jablonka is certainly right to insist on history's power to unsettle the present..., and he has made a passionate case that its mission and civic function have never been more vital.
* AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I. The Great Divide
1. Historians, Orators, and Writers
2. The Novel, Father of History?
3. History as Science and "Literary Germs"
4. The Return of the Literary Repressed
Part II. The Historical Way of Reasoning
5. What Is History?
6. Writers of History-as-Science
7. Approaches to Veridiction
8. Fictions of Method
Part III. Literature and the Social Sciences
9. From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth
10. History, a Literature under Constraint?
11. The Research Text
12. On Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century
