Historia, Narración y memoria. Los debates actuales en filosofía de la historia

MUDROVCIC, MARÍA INÉS

Akal

Lugar: Madrid; Año: 2005 p. 160

978-84-460-2063-9

HISTORIA, NARRACIÓN Y MEMORIA. LOS DEBATES ACTUALES EN FILOSOFÍA DE LA HISTORIA. By María Inés Mudrovcic. Madrid: Akal, 2005. Pp. 160 This book deals with three points as related issues: the problem of history in the Enlightenment, the debate about the narrative form of history and the memory-history relationship. Thus, how most eighteenth-century theorical reflexion about the scope of historical knowledge was caused by the concerns about setting history apart from belles letters and the legitimization of the use of reason over memory in fact selection is shown. Two centuries later, the writing of history as well as the history-memory relationship, return as historians´ agenda main points. This book, then, could be read as a history of philosophical reflexions about some problems relating actual debates with modern ones. Firstly, the book aims to show how those problems about boundaries of historical knowledge, methodological topics and style matters in history are grounded in a more fundamental problem underlying all eighteenth-century: different epistemological domain determination. Regarding this objective, three topics are analyzed: 1) Encyclopédie history roll and the rupture with the view connecting history with memory located in the article “histoire” written by Voltaire, 2) humean distinction between historical and fictional discourse and the roll of imagination in historical matters and 3) the impact of the idea of Nature in Progress conception. Secondly, in the “History and narration” section, different perspectives regarding the controversy about historical representation considering its turning point in the nineties are discussed: 1) scopes and boundaries of theories which have their origin in rhetoric understood not only as tropology but also as a theory of argumentation, 2) the function that the historical narrative has traditionally played in the constitution and social communication of knowledge and 3) the implications that narrativist thesis supporting the continuity between the narrative discourse and temporal experience for a relationship between historical discourse, collective memory and historian contexts. Finally, in “History and memory” section, tensions between historical past and historians present are discussed bearing in mind memory problem. In the second part of the twentieth-century, most of historian’s and theorist’s discussions could be viewed as questioning, or not, the rupture between memory and history that Enlightenment gave birth. Here, four topics are analyzed: 1) the change of testimony meaning from “evidence or proof to” real past to “access to” it,  2) the history of recent past epistemological assumptions,  3) psychoanalytical and neurological versions of the use of trauma as analytic historical category and  4) historiography contribution to a fear social memory constitution.