Fiction and History

Category: From the philosophers

  • Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research coming April 15, 2014 from Minnesota Historical Society Press

    Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research Edited by Bruce Joshua Miller   “Each morning I would strike out for this temple of learning in the crisp autumn air . . . with a sense of purpose and the conviction that this was where I belonged.”—Marilyn Stasio from Your Research—or Your Life             Inspired partly by Richard…

  • More ideas on the historical novel: Halbwachs, dreams, recollections

    Finishing Maurice Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory, I find some concepts that I want to roll around. My 1992 edition is a Lewis A. Coser translation from University of Chicago Press. I think a reading of this volume will be of great benefit to any writer who has written or is attempting to write books set…

  • Collective memory and the celebration of Saints

    [A] saint was commemorated on a liturgical feast day (and the most important might have several feast days, as did Saint Brees: in The Black and Gold Legend, Joachim de Marigny explains three such commemorations associated with Brees’s draftment, his captivity, and his ascension to Lombardi; these recall his being drafted to the National Football…

  • The Founding Legends and the Problem of Who Dat?

    Timothy T. Isbell, a friend and an author whose books I have been honored to promote, cracked this joke on facebook. It is far too clever to leave unrepeated: When The Who plays at halftime at the Super Bowl, I wonder how many of the really younger generation will look at their parents and ask…

  • Our question is first what nose, then whose nose by way of how nose

    This split in the cognitive and pragmatic approaches has a major influence on the claim of memory to be faithful to the past: this claim defines the truthful status of memory, which will later have to be confronted with the truth claim of history. In the meantime, the interference of the pragmatics of memory, by…

  • Memory, History, Forgetting, Editing

    …[B]uried under the footprints of memory and history then opens the empire of forgetting, an empire divided against itself, torn between the threat of definitive [erasure] of traces and the assurance that the resources of [recollection] are placed in reserve.” from Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting This sentence, impacted between semicolons, started so majestically, and…