Left-Wing Melancholia is both an exhilarating work of intellectual synthesis as well as a pathbreaking study in cultural history. Yet, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, Traverso also instructs us on how the experience of loss can simultaneously generate heretofore untapped repositories of social hope. With Left-Wing Melancholia, Enzo Traverso provides us with a timely and learned meditation on the politics of grief, mourning, and historical loss. Richard Wolin, author of Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption:
Taking inspiration from heterodox critical responses to the darkness enveloping Europe in 1940, Traverso seeks to uncover trace elements of a new utopian imaginary, as a leap without guarantees, a melancholy wager. The overarching trajectory of struggles oriented toward an emancipatory future that characterized and motivated movements in the past two centuries has been fundamentally broken, resulting in a profound melancholia. In this sweeping review of recent histories written in the first person, at the crossroads between history and literature, Traverso offers a lucid analysis of this subjective turn and a sharp critique of this new ‘I’ that speaks of and for the past: that of ‘Historian Narcissus.In this wide-ranging, conceptually rich, nuanced and thoughtful meditation, Enzo Traverso takes stock of the current historical moment as marking a fundamental historical and cultural crisis for the Left. Carlotta Sorba, author of Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy: Melodrama and the Nation Focusing on their interactions, he outlines what he deems a significant phenomenon in current historical writing: the growing intrusiveness of subjectivity and personal experience undermining a choral vision of the past. In this engaging book, Traverso guides us through the innumerable narrations of the past by contemporary writers and historians. Dominick LaCapra, author of Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts It should interest not only historians but all humanists and social scientists as well as the general reader. His erudite, insightful analysis extends more broadly to address questions about the very nature of history and its relations to other areas such as literature and film.
How do historians place themselves in history? Should the historical be personal? With his familiar acuity of vision, breadth of erudition, and generosity of thought, Enzo Traverso supplies a rich array of answers to these abiding questions-usually boundary-crossing, sometimes surprising, always grounded in a carefully considered politics of knowledge Geoff Eley, author of Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945Įnzo Traverso has written an important book about first-person, more or less subjective and hybridized history-a much discussed and debated approach that has risen to prominence in the recent past. A wide-ranging and illuminating critique of a key trend in humanistic inquiry, Singular Pasts reconsiders the notion of historical truth in a neoliberal age. Probing the limits of subjective historiography, he emphasizes that it is collective action that produces social change: “we” instead of “I.” In an epilogue, Traverso considers the first-person writing of Saidiya Hartman as a counterexample. Traverso argues that first-person history mirrors contemporary ways of thinking: such writing is presentist and apolitical, perceiving and representing the past through an individual lens. Sebald, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Daniel Mendelsohn write their works as investigations based on archival sources. He identifies a parallel trend in literature, in which authors such as W. Enzo Traverso considers a group of contemporary historians, including Ivan Jablonka, Sergio Luzzatto, and Mark Mazower, who reveal their emotional ties to their subjects and give their writing a literary flavor. Singular Pasts offers a critical account of the emergence of authorial subjectivity in historical writing, scrutinizing both its achievements and its shortcomings. In search of new and creative paths, it transgresses a cardinal rule of the discipline: third-person narration, long considered necessary to the objective analysis of the past. Neither traditional history nor autobiography, this hybrid genre calls the norms of the historical profession into question. A growing number of historical works include an autobiographical dimension, as if writing about the past required exploring the inner life of the author. Today, history is increasingly written in the first person.
0 kommentar(er)
