History as a Kind of Writing ─ Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography

Philippe Carrard, a historian and theorist of historical forms and functions, has an enviable reputation both in France and the U.S. He gives historiographers access to what writers of history in France have been doing the past 25 years, casting light on views of historiography put forward by literary theorists, by theorists of history, and by historians themselves. The field of historical theory has been dominated by Hayden White for a long time; Carrard bids fair to displace him, by showing how historians use other forms (i.e., in addition to narrative) for building their accounts. This book provides an overview of the current state of French historiography (touching on history of memory, contemporary history, political history, and other areas that the Annales school left out or rejected), but it aims to do more. Carrard examines conventions of historiographic writing at different levels, going from the structure of the whole book to specific points such as the use of the first person singular, the turn to figurative language, and the way documents are made part of the text. Throughout the book, Carrard is in constant dialogue with English-speaking theorists of history (from Ankersmit to Megill and many in between on our backlist), and among the many French theorists, he ranges from Henry Rousso to Paul Veyne, also on out backlist. He is at pains to keep the distinction between history and fiction clearly in sight, treating the uses of figurative languages, anachronisms, incompleteness of evidence, and more, all related to the poetics of French historiography, by which he means the study of ?the rules, codes, and conventions that operate in a given set of texts.”

Philippe Carrard is a visiting scholar in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier and The French Who Fought for Hitler: Memories from the Outcasts. He lives in New Hampshire and Switzerland.