History as Literature - Literature as History

Zur gegenwärtigen Wiederaufnahme der romantisch-aufklärerischen Kontroverse um die historiographische Fiktion

Abstract

The debate was revived through the methodological problems created by the anti-Enlightenment turn historiography took in the late seventies with the emergence of such schools as the Italian microstoria, the English oral or case history and the German Geschichte von unten. The loose relativism of these schools threatened the traditional hierarchy, which prefers documents, deeds and protocols - because of their „transparency" - over the „intransparency" of literary texts. Hayden White as well as Dominick LaCapra emphasize the rhetorical-textual character of all documents. Both agree that - if the text constitutes the actual space of classificatory systems in a given culture - historiography should not occupy itself with a narration of events, but rather with an interpretation of historical texts. But whereas White comes to a pantextualist conclusion LaCapra argues in the tradition of Derrida that the „institution" which directs the reading should be extended beyond a „discursive practice" a la Foucault, in this case beyond the historiographic practice. Where the neo-Romanticist White seems to free the present from all responsibility for the past - by completely dissolving the text of the past in the context of the present - LaCapra, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, tries to burden the present with the responsibility for the past, by trying to dissolve the context of the present completely in the text of the past.