History Is a Contemporary Literature : : Manifesto for the Social Sciences / / Ivan Jablonka.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Jablonka, Ivan,
• MitwirkendeR: Bracher, Nathan J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (294 p.)

Ivan Jablonka’s History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher’s work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes.Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- The New Frontier -- Introduction -- Part I. The Great Divide -- 1. Historians, Orators, and Writers -- 2. The Novel, Father of History? -- 3. History as Science and “Literary Germs” -- 4. The Return of the Literary Repressed -- Part II. The Historical Way of Reasoning -- 5. What Is History? -- 6. Writers of History-as-Science -- 7. Approaches to Veridiction -- 8. Fictions of Method -- Part III. Literature and the Social Sciences -- 9. From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth -- 10. History, a Literature under Constraint? -- 11. The Research Text -- 12. On Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century -- Index