Past event: Hayden White's Lecture on 'The Practical Past': Towards an Ethics of Historical Discourse
This event has now finished. Please see our events website for details of upcoming events at Brookes.
Monday 27 February 2012, 18:00 until 19:00
Open to all
Location
Main Lecture Theatre, Clerici, Headington Campus
Details
"The Practical Past" is a concept or a figure invented by Michael Oakeshott (in his book of essays, On History), and it refers to that aspect of the past to which we advert in order to answer the question: "what should I (we) do?" In other words, "practical" is meant in Kant's sense of "ethical," as in his Critique of Practical Reason.
For Oakeshott, the "practical past" is not the same as "the historical past," which means, among other things, that authorized or professionally accredited "historical knowledge" can claim no hegemony over the uses of the past motivated by "practical" concerns. This has important implications for dealing with recent debates in the West over the conflict between history and memory, documentary record and personal testimony, knowledge by experience and knowledge by learning, etc. These debates, in turn, bear upon important issues concerning the social reality of modernity, biopolitics, genocides, "states of exception" (Schmitt), and the like.
The notion of the practical past gives us insight into the ways certain post-modernist writers create new forms of the "historical" novel and redefine the borders between "history" and "literature." The literary work of Primo Levi (Survival in Auschwitz), Toni Morrison (Beloved), and W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz) will be alluded to and discussed. As for "historical" background, I will refer to Sir Walter Scott (Waverley) and Tolstoy (War and Peace).
Hayden White (Ph.D., D.H.L.) is University Professor & Professor of History of Consciousness (Emeritus) at University of California, Santa Cruz. Between 1997 and 2010, he was Consultant Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His numerous and acclaimed publications include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1973. German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Portugese, Korean, Chinese, Greek translations); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1978. German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian translations); and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1986. German, Spanish, and Portugese translations). Professor White is also an accomplished translator, having translated from Italian, Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology and, from French, Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy (with Robert Anchor).
