Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Writing History: Essay on Epistemology - Paul Veyne, translated by Mina Moore-Rinvolucri

I decided I wanted to read this after working through History, Theory, Text, where Veyne's work was cited as being a useful articulation of some of the key ideas that came up in the debate about the nature of history. Veyne is a classicist who actually wrote on Seneca (in general), so I fancied following him down this particular by-path; apparently he was very close to Foucault, and his writing does follow some of the Foucaultian paths you might expect.

I found two things striking about this book. First, I would never have understood as much of it as I did without having done the amount of background reading that, over the years, I have. Second, very little of it actually sank in. I found this with Veyne's work on Seneca as well; his style is rather flowing and elegant, and breaks over the reader in gentle, constant waves without really making terribly clear overall points. So I think that is a feature of Veyne's writing rather than his thinking; I certainly found his writing on Seneca much clearer the second time around, although I'm afraid that as it took me two weeks to get through Writing History I shan't be extending it the same courtesy.

The general points made here as what you would expect of someone who was a follower of Foucault. History is about tracing practices; history is shaped by its conventions, of which we are unaware; there is no such thing as history, discuss; we cannot escape our contemporary context in writing history; and so forth. The two final chapters discuss the interleaving of history with science and sociology, arguing that history is better than both (well, he would); earlier sections dissect the aim of history and ways of understanding what happened in history. The ideas are now, to me, very familiar, but I can imagine how they were rather shocking in their time; this was first published (in French, obviously) in 1970.

I was hoping, to be honest, to see Veyne be a bit more specific about how Foucault's view of history might be relevant to classicists specifically, but he takes a more general, sweeping approach to the question. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was a bit of a disappointment to see that apart from deploying Thucydides' ktema as a symbolic marker for what history is, and the odd reference to an ancient rather than modern historical example, there wasn't much hands-on engagement with the ancient world. So there we go - it's not a bad read, but I have to say that I got more out of the overview texts which describe this way of thinking than out of this particular primary text.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, Paul Veyne! Now there's someone I haven't read since 1998! Obv, I read him for Teh Ghay when I was writing about gender difference, transience and liminality. All pretty old hat now, as you observe, but we thought we were just soooooooo clever back then...