Suchergebnisse

Thecentral purpose of this essay is to clarify some of the terms in literary criticism that are being employed in current historiographical debates, and to comment on some of their possible implications for German history. As interdisciplinary theoretical debates proliferate beyond their immediate sources, contested positions often come to be built on misleading, heavily derived, or partisan versions of the concepts and practices drawn from the other side. Once battle has beenjoined, the issue of more exacting definitions and distinctions may go by the board. On the other hand, my modest attempt to provide a glossary for others' arguments may mask a more presumptuous claim to both the knowledge and the distance needed to set a tangled record straight. But although I want to suggest which insights might be valuable to historians, and which may be more problematic or unhelpful, I cannot pretend to adjudicate between currently competing theories of knowledge-production. For the German context, that undertaking would require at least some discussion of late nineteenth-century idealist historiography, and of the debate about modernization and modernity that can be traced through Marx, Weber, and Habermas. This will have to await another occasion.