I am not a history major. But I decided to take a 300-level history class in my final year of college. When I talked to my prof about the sources that I used for my term paper this week, he said that the author I was reading is a post-modernist. When I ask about what post-modernist and modernist means, I get a sense that it has to do with the notion of historical truth, like whether sentences about history can resemble the actual facts in the world. However, I am still confused about what is at issue. My prof gives me an example of how modernist and post-modernist view truth in general: modernist will say 1+1= 2 and post-modernist can say 1+1 = x. This example does not make sense to me, and I do not see how it applies to modernist and post-modernist in the context of history.
It seems to me that post-modernist cannot be saying that there are no truths in history. Surely, how tall was Hitler, how many wives did Mao had, and so on can have true answers and can be reliably known. So I take it that post-modernists are saying that there are no correct answers to those WHY questions such as 'did X win becasue of Y?' 'Why did Z win?' Is this right? Also, is post-modernist saying there is no true account of history or all accounts of history are true in some sense?
Finally, are there any accessible papers on the subject of modernist and post-modernist approaches in history?
Thank you!
I don't blame you for being confused about this question, and I'm not sure I have a good grip on it myself after finishing a PhD course (I would be a bad postmodernist if I did feel sure).
I myself would say postmodernism is too broad a term to usefully employ in thinking about history. It gets applied to art, architecture, literature, all kinds of stuff, and we have more precise terms for talking about the nature of truth in history.
Though I will defer to Indiana Jones on the question of truth vs. fact.
Leopold von Ranke worked out the modern study of history in the 1800s. His famous claim was "wie es eigentlich gewesen" or "How things really were." Ranke founded what is now the institutional study of history in universities, where students attend seminars, read books, listen to lectures, write papers with original research, so on and so forth. This is essentially a positivist attitude toward history, as in we can actually know things about what happened in the past. In some ways that's a useful approach, not least because if we believed we couldn't know things about the past, history becomes a rather pointless process.
In the 20th century we started getting linguistic theories that eventually came to influence history. Saussure, building on millenia of thought going back to Plato, identified the difference between the sign and signified, arguing that there is a break between language and thought. E.g. you can't always understand what I mean when I order a hot dog from your restaurant; my thought doesn't equal my speech. Derrida blew this up in 1963 in a paper titled Cogito et histoire de la folie in which he coined the term "différance," which is a play on the words (in English) difference and deferral - meaning the sign is both different from the signified and the meaning of any speech (or writing) is deferred - comes after the sign.
Ok, put all of that stuff aside for the moment. Back in the 30s, some French historians started thinking about this linguistic stuff and formed what became called the "Annales school." Our hero here was Marc Bloch, who died fighting in the French resistance. The Annales School embraced the "linguistic turn," that is speech is not the same as fact, and that school has become dominant in European and American scholarship.
The result of all this is that the questions we ask now are not as much what happened, but why does the evidence we have exist. I'm a historian, so I work with texts. My question when presented with a text isn't so much about what's the report it gives, but rather why the author wrote what they wrote.
For example, you might look at Tacitus' history of the Julio-Claudians and ask, like Ranke, what really happened, but I look at Tacitus and ask why did Tacitus write this way? What is the signified and why is he signaling it?
I think that's the kind of thing your prof is talking about.