POSSIBILITIES IN “A THOROUGHLY HISTORICAL WORLD”: MISSING HAYDEN WHITE'S MISSED CONNECTIONS

This article assesses Herman Paul's intellectual biography of Hayden White, the most important figure in the philosophy of history of the past half century. Offering a clear overview of White's career and contribution, Paul's account proceeds chronologically from the 1950s to the present, distinguishing the phases of White's career, but convincingly pinpointing an abiding core of concerns around an existentialist and liberationist humanism. In that light, White sought to show the way beyond historiographical realism to more innovative approaches—ideally to serve progressive politics. Paul notes, however, that White failed to connect with most mainstream historians, and Paul's account is not sufficiently probing and critical to explore the gulf. Indeed, following White, Paul is too prone to take White's particular liberationist agenda as the only alternative to a conservative, passive realism—and thereby to gloss over alternative ways of conceiving the postrealist cultural space. Moreover, Paul fails to note White's tendency sometimes to imply that mainstream history claims more than it does, and sometimes to denigrate prejudicially what it in fact does, or could do. Although much of White's challenge could have been especially salutary, he tended toward mischaracterizations that fostered polarization in the historical discipline and reinforced prejudicial understandings of historiography in the wider culture. Paul's overview provides a useful, and in many ways exemplary, introduction to White's legacy, but it is too deferential to provide a convincing overall critical assessment.     

HISTORY WRITING WITHOUT CLOSURE

In The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, Kalle Pihlainen pays tribute to Hayden White's work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. The book's seven chapters are based on previously published and reworked essays, starting with Pihlainen's 2013 essay on narrative truth and ending with his 2006 essay on the confines of the form. The Work of History is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as Pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical constructivism (xiii). At the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as White states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains White's work and its reception, including the debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. Although narrative constructivism seems a bit passé, Pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach to disentangle and explain some fundamental misconceptions about it that still exist among historians. One misconception is that constructivism inherently neglects the ethical impulse and supposedly lacks the potential for political engagement. Pihlainen urges historians and theorists to find ways of becoming politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same.     

Oral History and the Gerald R. Ford White House: The Specter of Watergate

For the last sixty years, presidential libraries have providedand preserved critical source materials essential for the studyof the history of presidents of the United States. Oral historiesat those libraries have become an increasingly important partof their key archival collections, with one or two major exceptions.This article analyzes and compares official oral history collectionsat the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library with those of othertwentieth century presidents and seeks to explain why the oralhistories currently available for research there were so limiteduntil Mr. Ford's death in 2006. The reasons for this are anintriguing blend of developed White House policy, benign neglect,the role of tape recorders in bringing Ford to the Oval Office,and the continuing influence of the ghost of the Watergate scandaleven well beyond the years Gerald R. Ford occupied the nation'shighest political office.     

微生物诱导碳酸钙修复汉白玉石梁裂缝试验研究

石质文物劣化后产生裂缝等病害,需要恰当的修复方法。本研究应用微生物诱导碳酸钙沉积技术修复汉白玉石梁裂缝,模拟石质文物裂缝修复。研究对象为带V型槽的非贯通和贯通裂缝的汉白玉石梁(尺寸为40 mm×40 mm×160 mm),修复方法为先注浆后自由下渗。通过对比石梁修复前后破坏荷载和强度的变化以及CT扫描技术可视化非贯通裂缝修复过程来评价修复效果。结果显示:修复后石梁裂缝表面致密光滑,颜色与母材相近,整体美观性好;非贯通裂缝修复后破坏荷载均有所增加,贯通裂缝修复后的抗折强度能恢复到原有强度的35.12%,均值为3.684 MPa,最高能达到5.234 MPa;CT扫描结果定性和定量均表明胶凝体密度随修复进行而增加,接触面修复质量弱于其他位置。     

DURABLE GOODS

In his thoughtful discussion of what makes some historical texts durable, lasting through time, Jaume Aurell arrives at the conclusion that these works show a balance between antiquarianism and presentism, and that this balance gives them a certain longevity of repute. Because, however, durability is a characteristic of the work, it seems to me problematic. Survival, rather than durability, appears to be the rubric we are discussing. It is not a characteristic of the work, any more than of a historical individual who survives a critical event like the French Revolution or the Holocaust. We identify survivors only retrospectively. A myriad of contingencies—time and chance—will obtain for any text to survive. Historiographical competition is ferocious, and worthy of study. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each historical text that fails to survive will have its own history. Why Gibbon and not Volney? We can adduce reasons, of course, but they are looks backward; in the late eighteenth century, no predictions were certain. Both Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit have, each in his own way, suggested the characteristics of the best histories. I believe they are mistaken, if best is to be taken to mean: most likely to survive. This is a characteristic of the ongoing reception of the work. As in an ongoing conversation, the historical work may advance the discourse, or contradict it, or change the subject. Whether it will have influence after the speaker has departed is up to those who remain and are added to the group. This rhetorical survival in the conversation is what is in question here. As such, it is profoundly historical, and not “beyond time.”     

试论金代扒村窑白地黑花瓷人物图案

本文以收集到的人物装饰图案为例,论证了金中期是扒村窑白地黑花装饰的繁荣期,并论述了扒村窑白地黑花瓷人物装饰图案所独有的特点及其影响。     

成化青花瓷器的鉴赏

文章以苏州文物商店收藏的几件成化青花瓷器为例,就成化青花瓷器的造型、纹饰、款式等特点作了初步的概括。     

河南巩义窑、河北邢窑出土瓷器的原料来源研究——以北朝和隋唐时期出产的青瓷、白瓷为例

为探讨河南巩义窑、河北邢窑出土的不同时期青瓷、白瓷的原料来源,用显微观察、电子探针(EPMA)等手段,分析其原料来源及技术工艺进行分析,并探讨两窑之间的技术联系。分析可知,两窑在瓷釉、瓷胎的原料配置上存在差异:巩义窑瓷胎均使用当地高岭土一元配方,瓷釉中加入瓷胎原料为基体并加入高钙草木灰;邢窑瓷胎在使用当地高岭土的基础上加入长石类矿物原料,瓷釉中除瓷胎所使用的黏土以外,还加入含有高钙高镁的草木灰或矿物原料。两窑还存在一些共性如:两窑瓷釉均添加石英类原料以提高SiO_2含量;巩义窑与邢窑两地早期、唐中期产品形制相似,原料配方有共通之处,说明当时两地在陶瓷的原料配方、制瓷技术中有过交流。     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.