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

This 'play on the dead' is developed into a concept of a whole genre. In her thesis Laura E. Moss writes: "Historiographie metafiction differs from traditional historical texts on one hand by the emphasis placed on the metafictional process of reading, writing, and interpretation, and on the other hand, by the political agenda of rewriting an inclusive history in a fictionalized form" (3). Hutcheon gives a detailed analysis of the way writers attempt to create different approaches to the past in this genre. She claims that writing history (or historical fiction) has an equal status with fiction-writing due to their common methods of selection and interpretation ("Historiographical" 66). The latter methods bring together the two disciplines. According to White, history is accessible only in a textualized form and the job of both historians and novelists both need emplotment strategies of exclusion, the emphasis and subordination of the story-elements (Metahistory

, 6). Another link between the two fields seems to be what Gossman defines as the Other, the primitive., alien, the historical particular. As for novelists, the cult of seeking the discourse of the Other, and the distrust of monomyths i.e. Dialogism seems to be a major interest today. In the context of Canadian historiographic metafiction it has a special relevance, since it opens up the monologue of a limited perspective narrator to the endless versions of stories told and breaks the tyranny of one's narrative. The discourse of the text contrasts the different approaches and representations of the past. This Other might be interpreted as other voices within a text, including possible voices from the past, as well as the reader as the Other with whom the writer is creating the story in the course of a dialogue. Recent Canadian fiction seems exemplary to present the special relationship between history and literature today, particularly because the Canadian national psyché seems sensitive to the search for a usable past. This kind of fiction provides a special way of rewriting and (re-)creating the past in a self-consciously auto-referential and intertextual fashion with the purpose of questioning certain authoritarian approaches to knowledge. Bowering describes the peculiar situation of Canadian fiction that is closely related to history writing in his essay entitled "A Great Northward Darkness: The Attach on History in Recent Canadian Fiction," where he calls the 27