The killing of history : how literary critics and social theorists are murdering our past

Author/Creator:

Windschuttle, Keith, 1942-

Publication/Creation:

New York : Free Press, 1997

Format:

Book

Edition:

1st Free Prees ed.

More Details

Additional/Related Title Information

Full Title:

The killing of history : how literary critics and social theorists are murdering our past / Keith Windschuttle

Subjects/Genre

Subjects:

Historiography
Historicism

Description/Summary

Table of Contents:

Paris labels and designer concepts: the ascension of cultural studies and the deluge of social theory -- The omnipotence of signs: semiotics and the conquest of America -- Bad language and theatrical gestures: structuralism and ethnohistory in the Pacific -- The deconstruction of imperial history: poststructuralism and the founding of Australia -- The discourses of Michel Foucault: poststructuralism and anti-humanism -- The fall of Communism and the end of history: from posthistory to postmodernism -- History as a social science: relativism, hermeneutics and induction -- History as literature: fiction, poetics, and criticism -- The return of tribalism: cultural relativism, structuralism and the death of Cook.

Bibliography:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary:

For 2,500 years, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have sought to record the truth about the past. Today, however, the discipline is suffering a potentially lethal attach from the rise to prominence of an array of French-inspired literary and social theories, each of which denies that truth and knowledge about the past are possible. These theories claim the central point on which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction between history and myth or between history and fiction. Historians in classrooms from Berkeley to Paris have embraced these views, and an increasing number of literary critics and social theorists now feel free to define their own work as history and to call themselves historians. The result is revolutionary: historians have not only changed how history is taught, they are also increasingly obscuring the very facts on which the truth must be built. In The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle offers both a devastating expose of the absurdity of these developments and a defense of the integrity of Western intellectual traditions which are now so widely attacked. Windschuttle examines exactly what is being taught about Columbus' discovery of the New World; the history of asylums and prisons in Europe; the fall of Communism in 1989; and the Battle of Quebec in 1759. He offers a much needed defense of traditional history as a properly scientific endeavor and argues that the great works of history should still be regarded as among the finest forms of Western literature.

Language:

English

Physical Type/Description:

298 pages ; 24 cm

General Note:

Originally published: Paddington, NSW, Australia : Macleay Press, 1996. Rev. and expanded international ed.

Local Note:

Woodruff copy gift of Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature Mikhail Epstein.

Additional Identifiers

Catalog ID (MMSID):

990010400650302486

ISBN:

9780684844459
0684844451

OCLC Number:

36847792

Barcode:

050000005426
010003524354