Threads and Traces
True False Fictive
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant and timely new essay collection takes a bold stand against naive positivism and allegedly sophisticated neo-skepticism. It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg’s life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian’s craft.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Included here are 15 essays by perhaps Italy's most renowned historian, a professor emeritus at Pisa's Scuola Normale Superiore. Ginzburg's (The Cheese and the Worm) range is remarkable, from "The Conversion of the Jews of Minorca (A.D. 417 418)," to "Paris 1647: A Dialogue of Fiction and History." While he seems influenced by the French Annales school's emphasis on "mentalities," the intellectual, cultural, and social currents that influence events, his interest here is on historiography. One of Ginzburg's most original and accessible essays is on microhistory, the study of, for instance, one rural village (such as Natalie Zemon-Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre), that his own work has sometimes exemplified. This is a demanding book, assuming knowledge of much pre-modern and modern philosophy, literature, and historical writing. For example, in his essay "The Extermination of the Jews and the Principle of Reality," a discussion of the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet's refutation of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, soon segues into a discussion of Italian historians Giovanni Gentile's and Benedetto Croce's "metaphysical theory of history." This is definitely not a work for the general reader. But for the specialist, it is rich in references to and insights about diverse historical perspectives. 10 b&w photos.
