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Document Type

Forum Theme 1

Abstract

Østrem establishes an intimate connection between personal, individual experience - and memory - and the wider scope of a historical narrative basing his account among other things on Hayden White's thought. I will take my point of departure in the two following well-known statements from White's Tropics of Discourse:

  • Many historians continue to treat their "facts" as though they were "given" and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much found as constructed by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before him. It is the same notion of objectivity that binds historians to an uncritical use of the chronological framework for their narratives. (p. 43)
  • […] we should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past "correspond" to some preexistent body of "raw facts." For we should recognize that what constitutes the facts themselves is the problem that the historian, like the artist, has tried to solve in the choice of the metaphor by which he orders his world, past, present, and future. (p. 47)

Publication Date

Spring 2006

Journal Title

UNIversitas

Volume

2

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

13

Copyright

©2006 Nils Holger Petersen

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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