Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)
Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: Histories, Truths, Fictions. Interdisciplinary Relations of Historiography and Philosophy in the Context of Recent Western Canadian Fiction
of thought often fail to work and other versions (e.g. oral narratives and personal perceptions) call for a generally more liberal attitude in our perceptions and judgements, whereas History is reduced to just another approach of human experience, as David Carroll claims: "The question asked of history in the novels in fact produces no valid, uncontradicted responses —history in its dispersive multiplicity is continually falling back into fiction, unable to establish itself against fiction as the form of true discourse" (Subject 128). In my view, academic preoccupation with methodology versus humanistic considerations of value sound oversimplifying, since the question of methodology in the research of the past must involve social, philosophical, moral and psychological aspects as well. As Zinn sees it, the basic question is how history can serve man today, and the answer one gives will define the method, whether it should be more narrative or more explanatory. In the last decades contemporary philosophers of history like Paul Ricouer, Hayden White and Timothy Donovan have introduced radically new perspectives in the study of the relationship between historiography and fiction writing. Donovan in his Historical Thought in America: Postwar Patterns (1973) changes the tradition of valuing objectivism over a subjective presentation of the past, stressing the historian's intuition related to the discontinuities of existence and fragmentary experiences, memory traces, as the most needed qualities in written history. This emphasis on the humanistic side of historiography opposed the data-collecting and rationalistic so called factography of the positivist historiographer and philosopher, Ranke's followers. Furthermore, that humanistic scientific scope brings us to the common ground of historiography and fiction writing explored by Ricouer in his three-'volume Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988), a key work of special significance He unveiled the fact that language is an element of primary relevance in both narrative versions, fiction and written history. He also called historians' attention to the recognition of their authority implied through the language of their narratives (just like in fiction), naturally involving the questions of power and ideology present in narratives. Ricouer focused on narratology and the problem of reference (fictional/imaginary worlds) in the comparison of these two fields. Hayden White's poetics of historiography 24
