Description
Book SynopsisSingular Pasts offers a critical account of the emergence of authorial subjectivity in historical writing, scrutinizing both its achievements and its shortcomings. Enzo Traverso considers a group of contemporary historians who reveal their emotional ties to their subjects and give their writing a literary flavor.
Trade ReviewHow do historians place themselves in history?
Should the historical be personal? With his familiar acuity of vision, breadth of erudition, and generosity of thought, Enzo Traverso supplies a rich array of answers to these abiding questions—usually boundary-crossing, sometimes surprising, always grounded in a carefully considered politics of knowledge -- Geoff Eley, author of
Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945Enzo Traverso has written an important book about first-person, more or less subjective and hybridized history—a much discussed and debated approach that has risen to prominence in the recent past. His erudite, insightful analysis extends more broadly to address questions about the very nature of history and its relations to other areas such as literature and film. It should interest not only historians but all humanists and social scientists as well as the general reader. -- Dominick LaCapra, author of
Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, PastsIn this engaging book, Traverso guides us through the innumerable narrations of the past by contemporary writers and historians. Focusing on their interactions, he outlines what he deems a significant phenomenon in current historical writing: the growing intrusiveness of subjectivity and personal experience undermining a choral vision of the past. -- Carlotta Sorba, author of
Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy: Melodrama and the NationIn this sweeping review of recent histories written in the first person, at the crossroads between history and literature, Traverso offers a lucid analysis of this subjective turn and a sharp critique of this new ‘I’ that speaks of and for the past: that of ‘Historian Narcissus.’ -- Thomas Dodman, author of
What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly EmotionTraverso's short and breezy survey...rings true. * New York Review of Books *
Sublimely readable. * Marx and Philosophy of Books *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Writing in Third Person
2. The Pitfalls of Objectivity
3. Ego-History
4. Short Inventory of “I” Narratives
5. Discourse on Method
6. Models: History Between Film and Literature
7. History and Fiction
8. Presentism
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
