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- Title
Histoire et littérature : plaidoyer pour « la main du potier sur le vase d'argile ».
- Authors
BLAISE, MARIE
- Abstract
Nothing was ever simple between Literature and History. Today, however, it seems that new prospects could alleviate their complex relationship: historians now speak about their desire to use rhetoric and writing style; they no longer claim a radical separation between author and subject and even argue about subjective positions and positioning the self in relation to their (his)storylines; and they are interested in the anonymous and the history of emotions... Memory writings were once discarded by historians, today testimonies, memoirs and hybrid combinations of academic and life writings are (nearly) common place. But acknowledging the so called "literature of facts" and testimonies as valuable because they are a literature of non-professional writers, or pointing to the moral danger of novels such as Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, whose fictional protagonist is a SS officer, reminds of something else. Since the birth of History as an academic discipline (and its effort in the meantime to discredit literature as unreliable) historians have feared the "aestheticization" of historical processes, as if literature could reconfigure historical understanding and, thus, demoralize History. Far from challenging that demoralization, this article aims to analyze it in an attempt to understand what Literature does to History.
- Subjects
LITERATURE &; history; LITERATURE &; morals; LITERARY aesthetics; LITERARY criticism; FRENCH literature; HISTORICAL revisionism; HISTORICAL fiction -- History &; criticism
- Publication
Études Françaises, 2017, Vol 53, Issue 3, p127
- ISSN
0014-2085
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.7202/1042288ar