Some Random Thoughts on History's Recent Past

Abstract

In these days of mixing genres and blurring boundaries between disciplines and concepts, when some words have changed their meaning and others have none left, it may not be superfluous to begin these reflections on history and the historian’s craft by stating some basic assumptions (“biases”) that inform them and this writer. The first is that postmodernism and deconstructionism have run their course in the humanities and the social sciences. These are posthoax times now and the “Sokal Affair” was not just an irritating embarrassment for some, but also a demonstration of the lack of substance behind an opaque, bombastic and at times incomprehensible jargon. To be sure, postmodernism and deconstructionism are still around, but theirs is a rearguard skirmish in a lost battle over the form and content of some major scholarly disciplines. However, in spite of their many eccentricities, excesses and much arrogance, in some of these disciplines their role has not been entirely useless and not as harmful as in others. History of literature and literary criticism have been the main losers and they are today a disaster area in terms of both research and teaching, having promoted literary illiteracy in cohorts of well-intentioned and naive college students. At the other pole, historians have been rather impervious to the siren song of postmodern “Theory,” to the premature postmodern requiem for the modern fact and to the postmodern trap of “unmasking hidden agendas,” while at the same time becoming more aware of the need for conceptualization and selfreflection. All in all, to paraphrase Frederick Crews’ remark, history has