One Question for Roger Chartier

Abstract

Chartier, Roger is currently Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Since 1969, he has been lecturing and publishing on the relationship between the material of institutions and the embodied practices which both animate and survive these institutions: in particular, early modern techniques of reading, disseminating and collecting printed information. The course of Roger Chartier's work indicates the multiple avenues of critical inquiry available to historians; R. Chartier has been in large part responsible for defining what this elusive discipline — cultural history — might be. His “On the Edge of the Cliff “ (1997) stages encounters with thinkers as diverse as Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Hayden White, Louis Marin, Philippe Aries. In the wake of this volume, French Historical Studies published a forum entitled Critical pragmatism, language, and history.