UNDERSTANDING HISTORY

Theoretical Debate On Understanding History

Theoretical Debate On Understanding History

Introduction

History means many things to many people. But to answer the question "What is history?" is a task few feel equipped to answer nowadays. And yet, at the same time, history has never been more popular whether in the press, on television or in movies. In our current understanding it seems we cannot escape the past. So if you want to explore this tantalizing question, where do you start? What are the most important skills needed to begin to understand the past?

Using the concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, and series involve all the transformations of historical analysis, not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems. The focus of this article is to discuss these theoretical problems of history in the light of Keith Jenkins rethinking of history 1991, Theodor Adorno's Commitment and the work and it also attempts to incorporate central ideas from Wisconsin Death Trip based on adaptation of sorts of a cult book of the same title by Michael Lesy.

Discussion

Although I'm trying to do this there is a negative work to be carried out: First, we must get rid of the whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity. We must also question those divisions or groups with whom we have become so familiar with. Can be taken as such, the differences between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc., which tend to create certain great historical personality? We do not even believe in yourself, when we use these differences in our own world of discourse, not to mention, when we analyze the groups of statements that, when first formulated, were distributed, divided, and differs in quite different: in the end all, "literature" and "policies" are the last category, which can be applied to medieval culture, or even classical culture, only the retrospective hypothesis, and the interaction of formal analogies or semantic similarity, but no literature, nor politics, nor philosophy and science are formulated field discourse in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, as it was in the nineteenth century (Keith, 1991, p. 25).

In any case, these divisions - whether our own or those of modern discourse under examination - are always themselves reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, institutional type: they, in turn, are facts of discourse that deserves to be analyzed along with others, and, of course, they also have complex relationships with each other, but they are not intrinsic, autochthonous, and universally recognizable characteristics.

Art at Work

As Sartre's essay What is Literature? there was less than the theoretical debate on the incidence and independent literature. Nevertheless, disputes the obligation remains valid, since all that just touches the life of the mind could be today, as opposed to purely human survival. Sartre was moved to issue his manifesto, because he had seen, and he certainly is not the first to do ...