HIEU 508 MODERNITY
AND HISTORY
Allan Megill,
University of Virginia, Spring 2002
Cabell Hall 335
1:00-3:30 p.m. Mondays
c:\wpdocs\0syllabi\38102sylyes
SYLLABUS
Note: Students should also
print out the syllabus for my philosophy of history course, HIST 506, version
of Spring 2001. This can be found on my personal Web page:
www.people.virginia.edu/~adm9e. Click on the appropriate “syllabus” link near
the bottom of the page. At various points, we shall turn to the other syllabus
for guidance. This syllabus is much shorter.
INSTRUCTOR CONTACT
INFORMATION:
See the Course Description and Requirements handout, which you need to
read in addition to this handout.
TENTATIVE LAYOUT OF WORK
Note: This layout is
subject to change, in tune with the needs and interests of the class. Note
also: Almost invariably I often list more reading than we can
reasonably do in a session.
|1 Monday, Jan. 21,
2002: Introduction
|2. Monday, Jan. 28,
2002: Some initial readings
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000: D13.5.E85C43 2000), “Introduction: The Idea
of Provincializing Europe,” 3-23, and chapter 1, “Postcoloniality and the
Artifice of History,” 27-46. For a longer, earlier version of chapter 1, see
Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for
'Indian' Pasts?," Representations (CB475.R4) 37 (Winter 1992): 1-26.
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures
Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1985), “On the Disposability of History,” 198-212. I may assign to a
student the task of reading and summarizing one of the following three other
chapters from Futures Past: “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity”:
“Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of
the Modernized Historical Process”; and “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of
Expectation’: Two Historical Categories.”
Allan Megill,
"'Grand Narrative' and the Discipline of History," in A New
Philosophy of History, eds. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995: D16.8.N427 1995), 151-73, 263-71.
Megill, “xxx”:
Possibly I shall circulate a short piece on which I am currently agonizing.
|3. Monday, Feb. 4,
2002: What do historians do when they do history properly?
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1975: D13.C3413 1988), chapter on “The
Historiographical Operation.” [also available on toolkit].
Paul Veyne, Writing
History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984 [1971]: D16.V4613 1984), chapter 10,
"Lengthening the Questionnaire," 213-35. I shall ask a student to
read and summarize this item.
Allan Megill,
"Recounting the Past: 'Description,' Explanation, and Narrative in
Historiography," American Historical Review (E 171.A57) 94 (1989):
627-53 [download, on grounds, from UVa Library].
Allan Megill and
Donald [Deirdre] N. McCloskey, "The Rhetoric of History," in Nelson,
Megill, and McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language
and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987: P301.R465 1987res99), 221-238. [on toolkit].
Allan Megill, "A
Preliminary Schema for Reading Works of History."
Allan Megill,
"Literature and History," Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical
Writing.
|4. Monday, Feb. 11,
2002: Chakrabarty and Fritsche
Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe, chapters 2, 3, and 4.
Peter Fritzsche,
“Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” American
Historical Review 106: 5 (December 2001): 1587-1618. [download from UVa
library]
|5. Monday, Feb. 18,
2002: Body, Soul, Spirit, Melancholia
Harvie Ferguson, Modernity
and Subjectivity: Body, Soul, Spirit (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000: B841.6.F47 2000). We shall no doubt return to this book later
as well.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of World
History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet from the
German edition of Johannes Hoffmeister, intro. Duncan Forbes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975: D16.8 H464 1975). Section on “varieties of
historical writing.”
Slavoj ðiñek, The Fragile
Absolute or--Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? (London:
Verso, 2000). I mention this work, should anyone be interested.
|6. Monday, Feb.
25, 2002: History of Historiography: Enlightenment to Professionalization
Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History
from Voltaire to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973: D13.S82
1973res99), selected items.
Hayden White, Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973: D13.W565res99), chapter 1, "The Historical
Imagination Between Metaphor and Irony," 45-80. Deals with the transition
from Enlightenment historiography, to Herder, to Romanticism and Idealism. A
student to read and summarize?
A much more detailed
set of readings is to be found on the syllabus for HIST 506 Philosophy of
History.
|7. Monday, Mar.
4, 2002: The Tamed Tradition and the Untamed
R. G. Collingwood, The
Idea of History (1946), rev. edition with Lectures 1926-1928, ed.
with an introduction by Jan Van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993: D16.8.C592 1993). Selected readings.
Allan Megill,
"History, Memory, Identity," History of the Human Sciences 11:
3 (1998): 37-62.
We may well combine
more reading of de Certeau with our reading of Collingwood.
Wednesday, March 6,
2002: paper proposals due.
From now on, a good
deal of our effort will be concentrated on making real progress on papers.
|8. Monday, Mar.
18, 2002
Readings from Fay,
Pomper, Vann anthology.
|9. Monday, Mar.
25, 2002
Readings from
Deleuze.
|10. Monday, Apr.
1, 2002
Readings from Fay,
Pomper, Vann anthology.
|11. Monday, Apr.
8, 2002
Readings from
Deleuze.
|12. Monday, Apr.
15, 2002
Assorted pick-up
work; possible presentations of paper fragments.
|13. Monday, Apr.
22, 2002
Ditto.
|14. Monday, Apr.
29, 2002
Ditto.
Papers due: Friday, May 3, 2002, by 4 p.m.