1. Recently I read two book reviews in Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society of texts that both acknowledge history as being primarily a literary form. The reviewer of Douglas Booth, The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sports History (London, 2005), pp. 120–2 suggests that historians are now more modest in their claims, are increasingly reflexive and that ‘it is difficult to think of any historian trained since the 1960s who would claim that their version of the past represented the last word’ (p. 121). The reviewer further maintains that while historians have abandoned the search for truth they have not jettisoned reason. The equation being made seems to be that while empiricism cannot guarantee truth only a certain form of reasoning can answer the question how do historians ‘know that…?’ The answer cannot, in the book reviewer’s judgement be sought in ‘an orgy of self-referential reflexivity’ (p. 122). The second review of Simon Gunn’s History and Cultural Theory (Harlow, 2006) is a far more forceful rejection of the necessity to address the ‘stale debate’ on Hayden White’s work (in favour of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur) (p. 127). While the first review tends towards the figurative device of ‘balance’, the second evidences a remarkable self-satisfaction with their self-proclaimed and heightened awareness of historical thinking and practice and that we have now ‘moved on’ to other more significant figures than White. I suspect this latter claim is made because White remains an incendiary thinker, while Ricoeur and de Certeau, though immensely significant theorists are wedded to epistemology. Always judge a historian by the theorists they invoke and a book (which you may never read) by the possible assumptions behind what a reviewer says? Axes, as they say, are only kept sharp by regular grinding.
2. Ray Jackendoff, Semantics and Cognition (London, 1983);
3. Michel Pécheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, translated by Harbans Nagpal (London, 1982).
4. For a more detailed analysis of the historical narrative understood as a discursive exercise see Munslow, Narrative and History, op. cit., pp. 16–63. See also Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York, 1988), p. 6.
5. Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’ in Michael Shapiro (ed.), Language and Politics (Oxford, 1984).