| Abstract |
"The recent trend of autobiographies written by historians has resulted in a further shift to a new hybrid form of subjective history writing, which includes a significant autobiographical dimension, as if history could not be written without exhibiting the inner life of the author. Neither traditional history nor autobiography, this genre transgresses inherited traditions and puts into question a fundamental and generally accepted assumption of history writing: third-person narration, i.e., a nonsubjective reconstitution and interpretation of the past. The most visible dimension of this "subjectivist" turn, as seen particularly in works by Ivan Jablana and Philippe Artieres but also in Dominique Kalifa, described as a "passeur" for his ability to interject himself into the underworld in such books as Vice, Crime, and Poverty (Columbia, 2019), and Mark Mazower, especially in What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press, 2017), which combines European history with the history of his own family, is a literary inflection that, without blurring the conventional distinction between history and fiction, globally reconfigures their relationship by injecting into the former many stylistic codes-first of all, first-person narrative-that traditionally belong to the latter. Therefore, a symbiotic in relationship emerges: whereas novels are increasingly obsessed with their historical verisimilitude-W.G. Sebald, JonathLittell, Javier Cercas-historical inquiries are built and told as stories, with individual heroes and thrilling plots. This expansion of the "self" posits some fundamental questions related not only to the epistemological status of writing history in the first person but also to the meaning of truth for both history and literature. Ultimately, it raises equally relevant questions about the world we live in, since this "subjectivist" turn is connected to a cultural transformation of our time that greatly transcends the boundaries of a single discipline. It results from "presentism"-a perception and a representation of time closed into the present--the past static, melancholic, the future devoid of an emancipatory vision-which is the neoliberal regime of historicity. Neoliberal reason is much more than a governing principle of global capitalism: it is an anthropological habitus, an ethos, and a form of life--private, apolitical, individualist. While subjectivism has given us rich horizons of multiple I's and different scalar views of microhistory, Traverso argues that we cannot lose sight of the collective story that is made of and by us and is the arena of political and social transformation"-- Provided by publisher. |
