History and its Literary Genres: Introduction to the Thematic Issue
Vanesa Matajc
UDK 82.0:930.85
The breaking of the "Rankeian" faith in the attainable scientific objectivity of historiography ("wie es eigentlich gewesen war") is a representation of a new — that is, modernist — paradigm. Brian McHale (1987) ascribes an "epistemological dominant" to modernism. Even in history, by acknowledging subjective realities in the shadow of the absent Truth, epis-temological uncertainty appropriates the subjectivism planned through the romantic and idealistic Geistesgeschichte, and enables historians to legitimize or become aware of their unavoidable presence in their own values and standpoints that Nietzsche's critical history would call "time appropriate," and their subjective (creative) imagination within their own discipline — that is, non-fiction historiography. At the same time, the doubt about metaphysical truth systems ascribed a deeper cognitive range to semi-literary and pure fiction forms; the culmination of the feeling of modernism — the zenith and the turn — is distinctly created and expressed by Nietzsche's essayist philosophy. In the first half of the 20th century, the "geography" of western metahistory expressed similar beliefs; for example, in Germany, Egon Friedell recognized a narrative characteristic of history as well as its relationship to literary fiction in his Geistesgeschichte survey titled Kulturgeschichte der Neuheit (A Cultural History of the Modern Age; 1927—31). History revealed itself to him in the form of saga, legends, and myths (Friedell 13). At approximately the same time in France, the Annales historian Lucien Febvre (who established the journal Annales together with Marc Bloch in 1929) became aware that human perceptions of phenomena are created by ideas, emotions, tendencies, and reactions; even by people's feelings, passions, and hatreds — that is, multitudes of uncanonized views, not merely the official views of selected individuals or institutions, which Febvre presented in his 1942 study Le problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle: la Religion de Rabelais (The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais). Even today this is considered a somewhat "controversial work;" "history, his words show us, can be like a lively conversation" (Hughes-Warrington 89, 90). It was not by accident that the complexity of views and feelings, for which a
more open "conversational" historiographie form is suitable, awakened a renewed interest in Carlo Ginzburg (Ilformaggio e i vermi [The Cheese and the Worms], 1976), for example, who used the method of "microhistory" within the new cultural history1 (cf. Burke 50—51). In the spirit of postmodern metahistory, Ginzburg is well aware of the fact that presenting the past cannot avoid rhetoric and subjective selection as well as stylization of the narrated. The British perspective that historians apply their subjectivity in the reconstruction of historical events was also expressed by R. G. Collinwood in 1935.2 The chapter from his book The Idea of History (1946) is the point of departure that Lucia Boldrini uses in her study to recognize the nature and expressions of the "Copernican" (Collingwood) or the "paradigmatic" (Thomas Kuhn) turn. With this, Boldrini actually realizes the modern derivation of the method that was emphasized by the Annales historian Marc Bloch in modern historiography. The method of his comparative history that advocates comparison of cultures or societies existing in the same place or time (cf. Hughes-Warrington 12)3 can be extended in modern metahistory to comparison of spatially and chronologically related text documents. In postmodern culture, the compared objects that are especially highlighted are texts of historiographic (meta)fiction and historiographic theory (metahistory). In this comparison, the relationship to the Geistesgeschichte method is especially obvious (cf. Virk's essay Strah pred naivnostjo [The Fear of Naivete]).
During postmodernism — which, according to McHale, is defined by an ontological dominant — ontological uncertainty is expressed as a multitude of truths between which there are no clearly determinable lines; it is thereby produced and expressed as conscious intertextuality, blending, and pluralism of discourse, as well as an exchange of scholarly and fictional discourse. As already mentioned, the way for this kind of intertextuality and application of meta-disciplines has been paved, most evidently in the field of historiography, by modernism in western cultures. In the period of ontological uncertainty, the convergence of literary fiction and historiography culminated in two different representations of the postmodern historical turn that, with the cultural and linguistic turns,4 combines into historiographic metafiction and scholarly-historiographic metahistory.
Both representations reveal their connectedness at various levels; for example, the early Lukâcsean Geistesgeschichte perspective (Theorie des Romans, 1920) defines the modern genre — that is, the novel — as an esthetic attempt to reconstruct the epic tradition or history — or, in other words, as a quote of the epic world's lost totality. Bart Keunen draws attention to the modern novel's citationality in this volume. The origin of the modern concept of totality that has been used as a criterion of literary and historiographic
genres since Romanticism, turned into a metahistorical representation, is explored by John Neubauer in his paper "Historiography of Literary History" and, in the spirit of Whitean metahistory, he extends it to the origin of modern literary history discourse. From the viewpoint of modern or postmodern historiography and in line with the logic of developing modernism (!), this discourse is revealed as traditional. Neubauer recognizes the original field of organic totality, which modern literary history discourse sought to achieve, in a discipline established in the second half of the 18th century — that is, biology as the history of living organisms.
Western epistemology thoroughly examined the fruitful expansion of the organicism concept in Romantic literary history, theory, and idealistic philosophy or its understanding of the creative subject and creation, whereas Geistesgeschichte reinterpreted it with the concept of immanent transcendence. In his article, Neubauer establishes concrete relationships between newly established biologistic concepts and literary history at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century (the transfer of the epigenesis concept — which predominated over older, previous metaphysics expressing pre-formation — to the "biological and metaphorical" notion of literature). Using concrete text examples by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, he presents the victorious march of the originally biologistic concept through the romantic "foundations" of modern literary history. Using concrete examples from Eastern-Central European national literary histories from the early 20th century — that is, Romanian (Iorga, and Ilinescu) and Croatian (Vodnik) — he then manifests the ideological turn from its originally liberal (autonomous, emancipating) context into a consequently nationalist and conservative context. This conclusion, in which literature and literary history reveal themselves as a political force, is justified by the postmodern shift of literary history to the concept of heterogeneity that abolishes the great story. This shift is also used by Neubauer's literary history of Eastern- and Central Europe. This practice is realized by recording unemplotted events, which thus avoids narrativity and also offers the recipient the opportunity to disperse the historical chronology of events into simultaneous component parts.
A second opportunity is offered by the revived history of events that undergoes emplotment in Whitean terms or builds up into a narrative form. Consistent derivation of both historiographic concepts thus leads to two tendencies formed by the postmodern awareness of historical value in metahistory: to a revisionism of historical or past understanding of history that can lead to an opposition of the pure experience of reality at a given moment, and to a revisionism that, by discerning the symbolic orders within a culture, consciously historicizes and connects the past with the present — that is, consciously emplots the selected events. In short, the
postmodern earthquake undermines Archimedes' "point" and the epistemological experience of instability leads to two "citation" paradigms: the Herodotean principle of history as a series of records made of individual concrete events, or the chronicle, and the Aristotelian principle of poetry as mythos or mimesis. However, in modern metahistory both "citation" paradigms are realized with an awareness of a displaced viewpoint — that is, from a relativized line between fiction and (historical) truth or reality.
Modern historiographic tendencies towards heterogeneity and homogeneity are described by Igor Škamperle in his paper "Družba, zgodovina in literarni pogled" (Society, History, and Literary Perspective). Škamperle is also the author of the philosophical-historical novel (Starikova 30, 31 and Matajc, Sodobni 206, 207) Kraljeva hči (The King's Daughter, 1997). In the same way in the novel and the paper — that is, with a distant view and, at the same time, directly involved; or, in other words, with historical distance and personal experience — he examines the diverse human representation of time in the 20th century.
Škamperle is thus incorporated into the metahistorical tradition that was opened by Geistesgeschichte (see above) and that was later simultaneously used by cultural history. Initially, cultural history was a neglected stepdaughter of political and economic plain history. The tradition of metahistoriogra-phy was then most strongly applied by the French Annales School. In the second half of the 20th century, Foucault's post-structuralist epistemology replied to early intellectual and cultural historical reflections and probably made the key contribution to the postmodernist historical turn, the metahis-toriography trend, and Hayden White's influence as well as the (literary) history method of new historicism. It is no coincidence that all the methods and trends listed above are summarized in a discipline that has been undergoing a revival and experiencing its heyday since the middle of the 1970s — that is, cultural history. This probably occurred because of the blending of the three turns (historical, linguistic, and cultural) mentioned earlier, which implies methodological pluralism or Bloch's multitude of approaches to the past. Fundamentally, the metahistorical blending of these three turns is probably made possible by the form that, according to Škamperle, is
important or even essential for grasping reality and the realization of truth to both the literary and historiographical spheres, regardless of whether this truth is fictitious or empirical with regard to events — that is, the form of narration. /.../ Within this context, we continue to return, in this way or another, to what it seems the basic knot — that is, the narrative event or cross-reference (as referred to by Paul Ricoeur) between the desire for reality in history and fiction — that is, literalized narration.
As a metahistorian and writer, Škamperle is aware of the contact between historiography and literary fiction — that is, narration and its time reference — but he also distinguishes between their temporality. Among the two time aspects that Škamperle highlights, the first can still be observed as a common practice of historiography and literary fiction, or "a time-form created by literary text either as a diachronic narration of events and, at the same time, its transcendence through entrances into the synchronic "now" — that is, both in the current now of the reader's reception and in the integrated historical moment of the event or object described."
As demonstrated by Peter Burke's5 comparison of concrete writers' or historians' realistic- and modernistic-oriented narrative strategies, historiography and literary fiction establish numerous analogue narrative strategies that articulate the time experience of reality. By openly increasing the share of subjectivity in documentary material, the second aspect or understanding of time provides (historical) literary fiction with an esthetic and experiential effect, and thus a contemporizing and revival of the past, whereby the esthetic form preserves the temporal duality of the past and present, the known and the other, in the reality presented.
Škamperle perceives this second understanding of time in literary practice; this is what the
/.../ imagination of the voice of the character or several characters appearing in the narrative is like. /.../ This is also literature's advantage over historiography. Literary text provides the voice of the historical character, who comes alive in our minds. It creates mental places that causally connect events that are not part of history or have not been recorded. Just think about how many such voices we know and what weight they have in a collective — say, national — identification.
Esthetic contemporizing of the past — that is, the other face of histori-cizing the present through symbolic forms — is reminiscent of the experiential effect that Wilhelm Dilthey (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften [The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Sciences], 1910) presented as the most reliable way of understanding the past in Geisteswissenschaften. However, Škamperle uses modern viewpoints of cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, and epistemology to think about the production and narrative strategies of creating such an experiential effect because he establishes that, at least partially (and this time consciously), modern historiography returns to the narrative event. Škamperle recognizes this return as an antipode of two modern tendencies — that is, the fractalization of experiencing reality (expressed in the form of a random blog) and "the transfer of symbolic speech into signaletics that causes the separating and representative moment as well as the rich ambivalence
of meanings and the semantic openness of the symbol to disappear. The virtual world of signs or signaletics is not representative."
As it appears, the effect of these two tendencies described by Škamperle can be discerned in everyday life practices. If the well-known Hobsbawm syntagm is transferred from a political and ideological-historical level to an epistemological level, the modern tension of "absolute" temporizing can easily be named the time of extremity.
Within the framework of "absolute" historicizing, Lucia Boldrini explores the literary representation of the historical turn or historiographical metafiction in her paper "Keeping our Nerve: Scientific and Historical Paradigms in John Banville's Doctor Copernicus". However, she does this by contrasting numerous metafictional levels, from genre syncretism to the narrative anachronism procedure in Banville's novel (1976), with the aspect of theoretical representation, and connecting both historical aspects into an expression of a paradigmatic turn; Banville's novel (i.e., historiographical metafiction) represents the structural entity of Kuhn's scientific revolution through the character of Copernicus and his intellectual context, as the crisis of passing from the Middle Ages to the modern age, but such that "through hybridization and by linking discourses, Banville extends Kuhn's analysis of the history of science into a comprehensive form, which could be referred to as the epistemes of the period in Foucault's terms. In Boldrini's opinion, the Copernican turn and postmodernism represent an introduction and an epilogue to the modern paradigm and, with his epilogical gesture, Banville expresses "a threshold of a new ism or a new synthesis."
It still remains open what the articulation of the future time experience will be like. For the time being, judging from the papers above, we are dealing with the domain of scholarly and historiographical metahistory and historiographical metafiction. The retrovision of "great stories" or "organic totalities", which reversely reveal their nature of the Foucauldian discourse of power and the articulation of political or national ideologies, is inseparably connected with metahistory (which can also be used as an umbrella term for both historiographical discourses).
National ideologies do not merely define the traditional — or, in fact, modern — literary history paradigms in Eastern, Southern, and Central Europe, as established by Neubauer's paper, but they also strongly influence the formation of literature created in these cultural zones. Because their geographic location also represents a place of meetings and appropriations of various 20th century political ideologies, the ideological reference of the literary fiction produced and received in this area is intensified accordingly. In his paper "Zgodovinski roman med nacionalno identiteto, ideologi-
jami in 'zgodovinskimi žanri'" (The Historical Novel between National Identity, Ideologies, and "Historical Genres"), Egon Pelikan observes various ideological dimensions in the historical novel genre from the viewpoint of modern historiography, which in this case combines the history of ideologies, literary history, and — by registering ideological strategies and tactics in literary practice — cultural history as well.
Ideological dimensions become especially evident by comparing two thematically extremely similar Slovenian novels (Boris Pahor's Zatemnitev [The Darkening], 1976, and Alojz Rebula's Nokturno %a Primorsko [A Nocturne for the Littoral], 2004); both writers create the same historical topic by referring to a personal experience (of a common cultural area across the Slovenian border):
universal contexts of European and world history /.../; the national historical context (violence against the Slovenian minority in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the in-terwar period); the rebellion in Friuli-Venezia Giulia after the First World War (the Catholics on one side and the communists on the other); /... / both authors (intentionally or unintentionally) also stand within the literalized ideological context of interpreting contemporary Slovenian history; this is why both (intentionally or unintentionally) quickly find their bearings in the political use of historical material in the form of literalized partial stories; /.../ a special context that unites both authors is /.../ the view of history of common Slovenian ethnic territory from the viewpoint of history taking place in its western part under Fascist Italy.
Although both novels are great artistic creations, Pelikan's paper proves how parallel reading of both of them demonstrates the historical novel as an eminent genre in which the ideological semantization of literary fiction can be realized; in this case it represents a national ideology as well as modern progressive ideas of the nation's political and ideological perspectives (i.e., political Catholicism, and communism).
The traditionally modern historical novel described above, as a histo-riographical fiction, thus also becomes the object of an analysis representing the postmodern historiographical interdisciplinary approach; the analytical methods that it motivates include the analysis of national and totalitarian ideologies, a chronology of political history, the history of the everyday, analysis of commemorative sources, and so on — in short, a syncretic union of literary history, plain history, and cultural history. From the viewpoint of the discourse of power recognizable in literary ideological representations, reality is revealed as a construction.
However, because of its constructedness, it can never present itself as absolutely coherent. This post-structuralist view is discussed in this volume by Beata Thomka in her paper "Deconstruction of History and Its
Narrative Identity." This post-structuralist view also expresses most strongly the awareness of historical relativism that is generally latently present in all postmodernist metahistoriographies. In the epistemological span from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, from the interpretation that Nietzsche emphasizes in his Will to Power, to the traces highlighted by Derrida, historians reveal themselves as interpreters that cannot talk about the past an sich, but only through text sources or documents of the past; the past is thus presented only as a textualized past or, in other words, as a text. The discoursive (de)construction of reality refers to the present and past in their simultaneous — and only in this way possible — representation. The described metahistorical stance, which most explicitly emphasizes the "intentionality and literary nature of history," is recognized by Thomka in the new historicism tendencies or in the modern cultural poetics established by the guiding force of new historicism Stephen Greenblatt in his textual reference to the works of Yuri Lotman ( Vnutri mysljasah mirov [Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture]).
This "intertextual terrain" is represented by some already classic modern European novels by postmodernist writers or those that at least to some extent break postmodernist relativism through existentialist heritage (cf. Kos). These authors include Umberto Eco, Lawrence Norfolk, Danilo Kiš, Péter Esterhâzy, and Lâszlô Mârton. They carry out the described act of postmodern historiography as a metahistory in its broadest sense, blur the lines between historiography and literary fiction, and perform a cognitive-theoretical turn from reflection to representation and metaphorical structures. Thomka observes the realization of this turn in Esterhâzy's novel writing; with his metanarrative strategies he explicitly presents the history of his family, country, and region, as well as his own past — all this as an interpretative construct that establishes the narrator or historian as a "narrative identity."
"The interpretation of text traces" in the paradigm of modern meta-historiography places (i.e., historicizes) all scholarly disciplines, including literary theory, into a historical perspective. Literary theory also convincingly places the narrative structures — that seemed ahistorical when recognized — into the historical mentality paradigms of pre-modern and modern times. In this journal, such a literary theory stance is realized by Bart Keunen in his paper "The Emergence of a Meta-Genre: The Modernization of the Novel."
In the intellectual heritage of Romantic Geistesgeschichte, especially with the early works of Georg Lukâcs, the novel was considered an eminent literary genre of modernism; it is understood as a new-age representation of the idea of modernism. By defining the proteanism of the novel, this
kind of understanding of the novel was relativized by Mikhail Bakhtin. However, also for modern narratology, proteanism is revealed in all its historical (historically different) forms of occurrence. Even if the novel is not realized from the modernist approach (if we accept Bakhtin's understanding of the novel), its modern versions can be observed, which Keunen dates to the 17th and 18th centuries, and their apex in the 19th century. This differentiation is enabled by the effects of two text strategies: the scope of the novel's semantic universe, and the type of its plot. According to Keunen, the meta-genre structure of the modern novel becomes evident from the viewpoint of transfer between pre-modern, final, "eschatologi-cal" dynamics of the plot to the modern, open, and "dialogical" plot; in modern versions of the pre-modern novel, divine providence, or at least preplanned ascribing of meaning to events, is replaced by a coincidence or tension between characters. According to Keunen, this (or a dialogical conflict) substantiates the modern novel as a meta-genre because it can combine all of the known genres and text strategies in its text strategy. This "quotation" nature of the genre is represented by the historical novel (a subcategory of the modern novel), which (at least) in its Scottian beginnings "quotes" pre-modern, eschatological plot dynamics, but ascribes them meaning in a modern way — that is, as a possibility of realizing a dialogical relationship between characters or between the characters and their spatial and temporal context.
In a narrative and structural manner, the plot's dialogical dynamics represent Bakhtin'spolyphonic character of the modern novel. It represents a shift from the medieval metaphysical vertical of Truth—man to the modern new-age horizontal of man—man or Mit-mensch (Peter Szondi: Theorie des modernen Dramas, 1956) and to the Lukâcsean Romanesque world that the gods have abandoned. From this viewpoint, the novel appears as a meta-genre or "quotation" of the lost totality.
Postmodern metahistory — also meta (literary) history — reveals this type of "quotation" under the influence of the Foucauldian discourse of power, especially in the ideological constructs of the past that correspond to the present. In this aspect, the papers by Marijan Dović and Gašper Troha perform the retrovision of literary production, reception, literary history, and cultural history in this journal.
Using selected historiographical, semi-literary, and literary genres of the texts discussed, Marijan Dović's paper "Zgodnje literarne artikulacije slovenske nacionalne zgodovine in 'slovenski kulturni sindrom'" (Early Literary Articulations of Slovenian National History and "Slovenian Cultural Syndrome") establishes how national history (or historiography) and identity were constructed from Protestantism to Romanticism
through the representation of two Slovenian myths: the Illyrian and the Karantanian. They both created and expressed an emancipatory national consciousness — that is, the motivation of national autonomy.
Based on Kant's definition of esthetic experience, Romanticism established the legitimacy of various discourses and thus (also or especially) legitimized the autonomy of artistic or literary discourse and, as shown in Neubauer's paper, at the same time negated the autonomy of esthetic artifacts. The thesis that became famous with Herder — that is, that a nation's essence is expressed most clearly within culture and the linguistic art or literature within it — subjected the emancipation and autonomy of literary discourse to a "higher" purpose — that is, the emancipation and autonomy of the nation — with its culmination in the 1848 Spring of Nations.
In this nation that (until 1991) remained without its own state, literature should assume the role of a representative of national culture and identity par excellence, and thus also a nation-building institutional function in which literature is appropriated by national ideology. Based on the viewpoints of modern meta (literary) history, Dović supplements this thesis, which was gradually developed by the Slovenian literary historian Dušan Pirjevec, and the sociologists Dimitrij Rupel (later, foreign minister) and Rastko Močnik — namely, the thesis of the "Slovenian cultural syndrome."
In the theater reception of drama, the ideological function of historiography is shown in Gašper Troha's paper "Zgodovinska drama in njena družbena vloga na Slovenskem pod komunizmom" (Historical Drama and Its Social Role in Slovenia under Communism), which analyzes the relationships between three social factors: the theater, authorities, and audience. Troha presents their ideological intersections using the plays Afera (The Affair) by Primož Kozak (staged in 1961), and Topla greda (The Hothouse) by Marjan Rožanc (its premiere was intentionally and violently interrupted in 1964). Both plays are thematically similar; they are both politically, ideologically, and socially critical and this is also how the audience understood them. Regarding the question of why the authorities received them in a diametrically opposite way, Troha replies with an adapted theory of ideology as developed by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his Logika antisemitizma (The Logic of Antisemitism, 1987): "The authorities divided society into 'productive' and 'unproductive' spheres, and then ascribed the latter the nature of a common enemy." In Troha's opinion, the function of the "common enemy" was assumed by Rožanc's play, which did not transfer its socially critical theme into a historical theme or, in other words, did not reshape it (or conceal) it in a literary genre, as was done by Kozak's play or other Slovenian plays with a historical theme in the third quarter of the 20th century that
expressed "radical criticism" of the social system and, at the same time, its confirmation.
Strictly speaking, Troha's paper represents the operation of strategies and tactics in establishing, confirming, and expressing the symbolic order of history-culture-literature. As also established by Škamperle's paper, the typical effect of the symbolic order is ambivalence. Appropriations of history (or historical themes) in literary genres are ambivalent; on the one hand, they represent Foucault's strategy of power, by which this power is established and maintained and, on the other hand, they represent individual tactics that adjust the authorities' power and thus partially subvert the authorities, confirming them in literature by using the ambivalent symbolic potential of historical signs (only seemingly and, at the same time, real).
Gregor Pompe's paper "Zgodovina opere in zgodovinska opera" (The History of Opera and Historical Opera) translates the described retrovi-sions of history, historiography, and historical artistic genres onto an interdisciplinary level. By comparing them to historical literary (fiction) genres, it outlines the characteristics of the genre of historical opera, which, the same way as Scottian literary fashion, became popular during Romanticism — that is, when "consciousness of history" was established (Lukâcs).
Although its integral element of libretto means that opera is also partly a literary representation, the historical theme potentially expressed in the libretto is not sufficient to place it in the genre of historical opera. According to Pompe, "musical materialness" is also insufficient. The genre characteristic of historical opera — which Pompe recognizes in, for example, the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Modest Mussorgsky — is provided by dramaturgy when it appropriately functionalizes the historical theme: "crowd scenes are at the forefront, which grow into large static images in which the importance of the visual and pantomimic is greatly increased; the share of intimate action and thus the number of solo acts is considerably decreased. /... In/ these operas, the historical theme acquires a conceptual power and thus its role is elevated from mere decoration." Conceptual power can be modified into an ideological — or more precisely, a nationally ideological — power because the heyday of historical opera takes place in the time of the Spring of Nations.
Neubauer's paper provides arguments for the "nationalist" deautono-mization of national artistic production in literature or literary history, whereas Pompe's paper in this volume extends the historiographical field into an interdisciplinary approach; among other things, it shows how my-thistory also operates in musical production and reception, with the only exception that it uses its own expressive and material practice. With its
interdisciplinary method of genre theory, Pompe's theory thus opens the path to cultural-historical research on culture.
NOTES
1	"The term 'new cultural history' started to be used at the end of the 1980s. /.../ This is a new 'paradigm' in the sense in which this term is used in Thomas Kuhn's work on the structure of scientific "revolutions" / ./when 'a new research tradition emerges from the model of normal practice" (Burke 57).
2	Collingwood resists the "scissors-and-paste" understanding of historiographical practice and the historian's blind trust in an 'authority' whose words he blindly pastes to his conclusions. However, in his awareness that this historiographical practice is problematic, the historian establishes himself as his own authority that verifies and certifies himself: 'historians do not evaluate evidence, but simply write down what they see or, in other words, they 'read' the evidence. Evidence is created from what they 'say' from their own viewpoints. The historian works with his own abilities; he performs 'the aesthetic act of reading a certain text in a language he knows, and assigning to it a certain sense" (Hughes-Warrington 43).
3	Marc Bloch described his own concept of comparative history in his article "Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes".
4	The standard Slovenian translations of these turns are the following: obrat k zgodovini (historical turn), obrat h kulturi (cultural turn), and obrat k jeziku (linguistic turn). In this paper, these syntagms take into account (as opposed to the standard translation) the "basic features" or "aspects" of the reality understood or studied — that is, their embeddedness in his-toricism, in the symbol orders of culture or culturalism — as well as articulation, which in the discipline or narration is inevitably wordy, linguistic, and organized into a linguistic discourse with which — with regard to the Foucauldian definition of discourse systems — gains characteristics that make it part of the episteme of historicism and culturalism mentioned above.
5	Referring to the film historian Sigfried Kracauer, Burke illustrates structural similarities between historiography as an academic discipline and literature: from story-forming, successive narration to modern temporal fragmentation and breaking-up of the story (Burke Zgodovina, 78; cf. also Matajc, Risanje, 168).
Translated by Donald F. Reindl
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